Download: SIF Rollover Process Document 2013 v1.pdf

Introduction

In order to prepare a new school year it is necessary to perform a “Roll over” of school information for all students in the Student Information System. This involves advancing students in the Student Information System to new grades, possibly changing school information as part of the roll-over. In an environment where the SIS is connected to an Identity Vault this process needs to be done in a way that properly cleans up all the identity information, school information and section/course information in the vault as well as guaranteeing proper synchronization of the newly ‘rolled over’ identity information to other systems connected to the Identity Vault.

Warnings

When performing the rollover process your Zone Integration Server, Identity Management Server and your directories will be processing a very large number of events. The following warnings are compiled from our experience over the last several years.

If your Identity Management System is connected to eDirectory it is very important that you do not start the Rollover process unless your directory is healthy and all servers are on and available during the entire process. An eDirectory health check is recommended for all customers. Failure to do so will cause many errors in your eDirectory environment.

If your Identity Management System is connected to Active Directory you must also ensure all of your Domain Controllers are up and available during the entire process.

If you are using Novell Storage Manager or File System Factory in your environment and you are using shared storage you will need to remove the shared storage policies prior to synchronizing the new school year. Once that process has been completed you may re-associate the shared storage policies and perform a backfill to create the shared storage. Failure to do this in the correct order will overload the FSF/NSM Engine and likely require a support call from the manufacturer.

If you are connected via IDM driver to an email system it is important to know that the course groups will be removed during this process. Also some districts will delete users out of their Directory at the end of the year. This may delete your users out of your mail system

Before the Rollover Process Begins

Before beginning the rollover procedure within your Student Information System (SIS), the following steps should be completed.

Log into the iManager that is installed on your IDM Server. The URL for this is usually https://{IP or DNS of IDM Server}:8443/nps .You should see something like the following.Image Modified
Click on the link for “Identity Manager Overview”. If you don’t see this screen you should still be able to find the “Identity Manager Overview” on the “Roles and Tasks” screen under the “Identity Manager” role.
The screen that comes up will allow you to search for IDM driver sets in your Identity Vault. To do this click the “Driver Sets” tab and it will show you a list of all driver sets configured in your Identity Vault. Select the driver set containing the SIF driver.
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The Driver Set Overview screen will look similar to the screen shown below. The number and type of Identity Manager drivers you see on your Overview may vary. For the purposes of the Rollover process, we are primarily concerned with the Concensus SIF driver. Image Modified
Perform the following operations on the SIF driver:
1. Stop the SIF driver
  This is done by left clicking the green circle in the top-right corner of the driver icon and selecting Stop from the menu. When the driver has stopped it will appear as the red circle shown in the screen-shot above.
2. Unregister the SIF driver with the ZIS.
  - This is done by left-clicking the driver icon and selecting Edit Properties. On the Driver Configuration tab scroll down to locate the Driver Parameters section. Change the ZIS Registration option to Unregister From ZIS and click OK on the driver properties screen. Image Modified
  - Now click the red circle and select Start Driver .
  - The driver will start, unregister itself from the ZIS and then shut down.
3. Left-click the driver icon to go into the Edit Properties screen of the driver and locate the Startup Option section and change the driver to Disabled. Disabling the SIF driver prevents the IDM engine from caching events for the SIF driver during the rollover process.
At this point, the system will no longer react to changes in the Student Information System (SIS).

Perform the Rollover

The student record updates may now begin in the SIS without impacting the Identity Management system.

Prepare the identity Management System for the New School Year

The Student information data from the previous year along with any Section Groups need to be cleaned up. Because the rollover process causes such a large number of data changes on student objects, Concensus has created the SIF Repair Tool (SRT) for cleaning up data from the previous year. However, prior to running SRT a decision needs to be made regarding existing Section Groups. SRT will delete the Section Groups from the previous year. When you delete the Section Groups, it is better to delete these groups while your Identity Connectors are running to allow the deletes to propagate to the connected systems. The SRT has a separate operation for deleting the section groups out and should be completed first with the connected drivers running.

Concensus SIF Repair Tool (SRT): Part 1

Starting SRT

To start the SRT you first need to download the SRT from http://support.concensus.com

The SRT is a Java jar file. To start it you can double click the jar file. SRT should start if your Java environment is installed correctly. Alternatively you can open a command prompt to execute the SRT. From the prompt, type java –version. If this successfully returns a Java version then Java is installed in your path and you may continue to the next step. Otherwise, Java is either not installed on the machine or is not in your path. For help on this problem go to www.java.com. If Java is correct, go to the folder where the SIF Repair Tool jar file is located and run the following command: java –jar SIF_Repair_Tool.jar

If SRT starts correctly the SRT application should display as shown below. Image Modified

Connecting SRT to the Identity Vault

The first step is to set up the connection to the Identity Vault. After entering the settings you can save the configuration settings for future use. SRT does not store password information. For the LDAP Server URL it does not require any special setup to use a secure connection. The application is designed to accept the server certificate. It is recommended you use ldaps://{IP address or DNS of Server}:636. The Admin DN and SIF Driver DN are both in LDAP form as shown in the example below. The settings should look similar to the example shown below.

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Initial Clean-up Step

Once the settings have been entered go to the “Clean Up” tab. And for the first run only check the box for “Delete Section Groups and Student Section Enrollments”. This step should be run first because we want to synchronize these group delete events to the connected systems. If you don’t want to synchronize the removal of the section groups to all connected systems then skip ahead to Concensus SIF Repair Tool (SRT): Starting and configuring SRT

Otherwise Click Start when your screen looks like the example shown below.

Warning!!! When you click Start the groups will be deleted in the Identity Vault and the delete events will synchronize to the connected systems if those connectors are still running. Image Modified

Once this is completed all the Section Groups should be removed from your Identity Vault. Wait until these events have synchronized to your connected systems prior to continuing.

Concensus SIF Repair Tool (SRT): Starting and configuring SRT

Prior to running the SIF Repair Tool it is essential to stop and disable connectors synchronizing with other systems. This is done to prevent changes being made by SRT from being synchronized to the connected systems until the new school year’s data starts to flow from SIF.

Start by logging into the iManager that is installed on your IDM Server. The URL for this is usually https://{IP or DNS of IDM Server}:8443/nps .You should see something like the following.
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Click on the link for Identity Manager Overview if you don’t see this screen you should still be able to find the Identity Manager Overview under the Roles and Tasks screen under the Identity Manager role.
The next screen allows you to search for the IDM driver set in your system. To do this click the Driver Sets tab and it will show you a list of all driver sets in your system. Select the link to open the driver set overview for the driver set containing the drivers to be disabled.Image Modified
The screen below is a sample Driver Set Overview. The Concensus SIF driver is the only one displayed in the sample. However, if you have other drivers configured in your system they will show up here. These other drivers are the ones to be stopped and disabled.
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On each Driver listed we will need to stop them and then disable them. Disabling a driver prevents the IDM engine from caching changes that the SIF Repair Tool will be making to the IDVault. Repeat the following sub steps for each driver in your system.
Click the green circle and select Stop Driver .
Click the red circle and select Edit Properties. Find the Startup Option section and change the driver to Disabled.
Start the SIF Repair Tool following the steps outlined in Concensus SIF Repair Tool (SRT). The SRT should display as shown below.
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Enter the configuration settings for the SIF Repair Tool following the steps outlined in Concensus SIF Repair Tool (SRT). If you have saved settings from Part 1, load the settings you saved from before and enter the password. The SRT should look similar to the example shown below.
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Once the configuration settings have been entered or loaded go to the Clean Up tab. Check both the second and third options under the perform list: Remove Student School Enrollments and Student/School Group Memberships and Remove Student Enhancement Attributes. Click “Start” when your screen looks like the example below.
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Now we have cleaned up all the information from last years SIF data.

Synchronize New School Year Data to the Identity Management System

The SIS rollover has been done and the SRT has been run, the IDVault is cleared out of all the old data and the Student Information system has been rolled over to the new school year. We are now ready to start migrating the data to the IDVault.

There are two main steps in the migration.

- Synchronize the data from the SIS to the IDVault

- Synchronize the data to the connected systems.

This will give us a chance to check the data before it affects any downstream system.

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