Martin Barbary, the university's strategic initiatives manager, told Computerworld the organization's IT architecture has been changing for the past two years and involved everything from back-end systems to identity management.
"We have a desktop SOE and will enforce that, but a lot of it is about the meta-directory implementation and consolidated security," Barbary said. "We will have same sign-on but not necessarily single sign-on."
The PeopleSoft student administration system will remain as the "master, unique identifier" for everyone at the university and data will flow through a meta-directory to a "multitude of systems".
Novell's Nsure and eDirectory products will be used but NetWare will be dropped and Microsoft's Active Directory will become the main directory server.
"We will still use [Novell's] Zenworks to make management of clients easier, but people will start authenticating against Active Directory," Barbary said, adding the Novell systems will be swapped to a NAS environment. "We purchased an EMC NAS after a full evaluation. This backs onto the EMC SANs."