Communications-Enabling the Business of Education• IBM WebSphere Portal 6 • IBM WebSphere Web Content Management System 6 • IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory 6 Others • Ruby on

How San Francisco State University Architected a 21st Century Collaborative Ecosystem

Communications-Enabling the Business of Education

CASE STUDY Communications-Enabling the Business of Education: How San Francisco State University Architected a 21st Century Collaborative Ecosystem Sponsored by: IBM

January 2008 Situation Overview Since 1899, San Francisco State University (SF State) has been one of the nation’s leading public urban universities, educating and training generations of students in creative arts, science, business, humanities, public health, and numerous other disciplines. SF State is a microcosm of the diverse, creative and cosmopolitan region that surrounds it, and the university is recognized for its dedication to faculty and student community engagement and service. Even while doing leading-edge research, the award winning faculty at SF State maintains a focus on excellence in teaching and challenging students toward intellectual accomplishment. SF State is known as a national leader in welcoming and drawing strength from diversity—in faculty hiring, in the student population, and in the curriculum. There is no "majority" group — about 70% of undergraduates are people of color — and the university is a leader in the number of ethnic minority students graduated. It is a major draw for international students, ranking first in the nation among master's degree granting institutions in international student enrollment, and it has an equally strong study abroad program that sends students around the world. To meet the educational needs of this diverse, community-minded student population and the nearly 4,000 faculty and staff that support them, SF State concluded that it needed a way to minimize the time and distance between people, between people and systems, and between people and information. In addition to the 34,000 students, faculty, and staff, there are also other members of the SF State community who need access to online systems. Students who have graduated still need access to some system functionality, and newly admitted students who have not yet matriculated need to be granted access to elements of the system as well. In total, there are actually over 50,000 people using the SF State systems. When dealing with thousands of people, it was impossible for the IT department to handle so much churn manually; consequently, any solution the university deployed would need to do as much auto provisioning and auto maintaining as possible. The university concluded that its systems needed a major overhaul. Just giving people access to instant messaging (IM), presence, and Web conferencing was insufficient. Just having a system that did a little auto provisioning was also insufficient. The IT division, under Jonathan Rood, understood that people have identities, roles, and different levels of access to online information; they also use multiple systems, have mobility needs, and rely on multiple devices and access methods. In short, there was a complex web of interdependency among people, systems, and information that the then current solutions were not able to cope with. As a leader and innovator in educating people, SF State knew it would have to architect and build a new and different kind of communications system to meet the

Solution Overview

Customer Profile San Francisco State University. San Francisco, California.

Business Situation As an urban university with a diverse population living on campus and throughout the San Francisco Bay Area, SF State needed to create a collaborative ecosystem that would enable students to learn, communicate and engage with each other in a virtual university community.

Solution Creation of a largely autonomous, self provisioning, collaborative ecosystem based on integrating IBM unified communications and collaboration software into university business processes based on roles, process maps, and directories

Benefits • Enables 50,000 users, whether

remote or on campus, to instantly communicate, collaborate, and participate with the full university community.

Solution Components IBM • IBM pSeries Servers • IBM Tivoli Storage Manager • IBM Lotus Domino 8 • IBM Lotus Notes 8 • IBM Lotus Sametime V7.5.1 • IBM WebSphere Portal 6 • IBM WebSphere Web Content

Management System 6 • IBM WebSphere Portlet

Factory 6 Others • Ruby on Rails • Oracle PeopleSoft • Moodle

needs of a 21st century student body and staff. It needed to create a self-service, always-on collaborative ecosystem that enabled anytime/anywhere interaction between faculty and students, people and systems, and people and information all based on people’s roles and the business processes and applications used by the university. A simple, yet powerful example of SF State’s use of this ecosystem is in student/professor interaction. University professors typically post office hours each semester — several hours per week when students are guaranteed to find them available in their offices. Typically, some students’ schedules will conflict with these posted office hours, preventing them from taking advantage of the opportunity to get assistance from their professors outside of class. At SF State, professors have the option to hold some of their office hours remotely, either regularly or ad hoc, in order to make themselves more available to students. For example, at 10:00 p.m. students and professors might log into their personal portlets from the convenience of home. By surfacing IBM Lotus Sametime capabilities through individual portlets, students and professors can look at each other’s presence indicators to see if others are available online. Professors or students can exchange instant messages and conduct instant web conferences from within their portlets. Meetings can be one-on-one or multiparty, meaning that several students can collaborate simultaneously with each other and/or the professor. The tremendous value to the SF State community is that professors and students can interact as if they were in the professor’s office from any convenient place at any convenient time even though they may be miles apart.

© 2008 Wainhouse Research 2

Options SF State Considered SF State was looking for a full collaborative environment in which their students, faculty, and alumni could communicate. The university needed a set of capabilities and solutions that could integrate with their current investments, streamline many of their manual processes, and enable users to gain access and communicate within their current university applications, but also with each other using tools like email, instant messaging, and Web conferencing. SF State knew that other educational institutions and enterprises faced many of the same integration, collaboration, security, and data accessibility issues it was encountering. However, after numerous discussions with the IT departments at other universities and with some businesses, it became clear that few, if any, had implemented a solution that would come close to meeting the needs of SF State. Although SF State had been using IBM Tivoli Storage Manager1 (TSM), Andrew File System2 (AFS), and IBM Lotus Notes3 and Domino for several years, the IT department consulted with many vendors about the university’s needs and its vision for a collaborative, fully interconnected and automated ecosystem. Many of these vendors had interesting and useful solutions, but most were unable to connect all the dots between the university’s vision and the solutions they offered. After carefully considering each option — even mixed-vendor solutions — SF State chose to work with IBM on developing its collaborative ecosystem. IBM was selected because of its reputation, the comfort level SF State had with IBM, and because the university felt IBM had greater depth and support for the collaborative initiative at hand. What IBM offered SF State was the following:

• A services organization that understood how to map roles and business processes to directories and implementations

• Authentication and security solutions that would allow creation of a single identity and single sign-on to access all systems

• A full set of collaborative solutions in IBM Lotus Notes and IBM Lotus Sametime, each of which had a compelling roadmap and which tightly integrated into the overall collaborative ecosystem

• A full set of software with open interfaces that allowed middleware development for interconnecting and integrating the wide variety of other software SF State was using,

• Portal creation solutions that would allow middleware developers to bring in data and information from disparate systems and present these to users

1 The IBM Tivoli Storage Manager family of offerings provides centralized, automated data protection that enables organization to protect data from failures and other errors by storing backup and archive data, as well as compliance and disaster-recovery data in a hierarchy of offline storage. It supports computers running a variety of different operating systems, on hardware ranging from notebooks to mainframe computers and connected together through the Internet, wide or local area networks, or storage area networks (SANs). 2 The Andrew File System (AFS) is a distributed networked file system developed by Carnegie Mellon University. AFS uses Kerberos for authentication, and implements access control lists on directories for users and groups. Each client caches files on the local file system for increased speed on subsequent requests for the same file. This also allows limited file system access in the event of a server crash or a network outage. 3 IBM Lotus Notes is an integrated desktop client for accessing business e-mail, calendars, group scheduling, IM/presence, and other applications that run on an IBM Lotus Domino server.

IBM understood how to map

individual roles and business

processes into directories and

implementations.


in individual-centric portlets (For example, students can check their email, get class schedules or grades, see who is logged in, or check tuition payment status from within their individualized portlet.)

• A flexible, open standards approach that allowed the university to capitalize on existing investments in applications such as Oracle PeopleSoft and Ruby on Rails.

• A packaged solution of software, hardware, and services that would leverage and extend the capabilities of the IT staff while simplifying system administration through automation, enabling staff to do more without being overburdened.

“The strongest and best part of the IBM solution

is that the integration

actually works well. That is –

especially for me as a technical

lead/architect – a very strong part of the solution.”


Roles, Process Maps, Directories, and Implementation The first and in hindsight most important step SF State took toward developing its collaborative ecosystem was hiring a consultant -- IBM’s Global Technology Services group, which is expert in mapping business processes through to implementation. SF State created a four-step methodology to go from roles to processes to directories to solutions, as follows: 1. Identify the Roles The many individuals at the university each have one or more roles they play in the organization. SF State identified many different roles and affiliations including:

• Student Standing o Incoming, Continuing, Former Student, Matriculated o Freshman, Sophomore, Junior, Senior, Graduate Student

• Academic Affiliation o College o Department o Major o Classes

• Employment Status o Faculty or Administrative o Full or Part Time o Job Code/Type: e.g., Department Head, Managerial

• Extracurricular Membership o Athletic Teams o Clubs

2. Develop Use Cases and Map the Processes For each role implemented, SF State developed use cases that abstract the business processes people use. At every instance where data is involved in the process, triggers are required to identify what data is needed, where it resides, what format it is in, and what rights a person requires to access it. Hundreds of different use cases and process maps are needed to depict individual roles. 3. Map the Roles into the Directory The directory is fundamental to the SF State solution. Each role with its attributes and required data permissions is mapped into the directory. A student’s attributes, for example, included not only authentication information, but also classes in which the student was enrolled, clubs in which the student was a member, classes already taken, year in school, and many other descriptors. Other roles would have similar attributes. 4. Create a Portlet Based on Roles, Processes, and Data Based on the roles and process maps, portlets were created that provide the data and information each role requires along with options based on process flows. Here the middleware populates portlets with data unique to each particular person, based on the person’s roles as identified in the directory. Each role identifies what data should be displayed, how it should be displayed, and what actions can be performed on the data based on that specific role.

“The user provisioning is seamless using Tivoli Directory

Integrator.”


Figure 1: One of the many process maps SF State created. The next section provides concrete examples of the ways students and faculty are using the unique collaborative ecosystem created by SF State.


Examples of How the Ecosystem Works Virtual Study Groups With many SF State students commuting to campus, working, and supporting families, arranging a study group at the university library can feel like major event planning. Using IBM Lotus Sametime instant messaging and web conferencing, students can fit in a study group session during lunch breaks at work, or between dinner and getting kids to bed without having to factor in added travel time. Similarly, online help sessions conducted via IM and instant Web conferences can be scheduled at any time of the day.

Figure 2. The SF State portal showing embedded Lotus Sametime presence capability.

11th Hour Cramming We’ve all done it, cramming for an exam at 11:00 p.m. the night before. In these situations, it often happens that someone may not understand a particular principle or he/she may not have a particular lecture note. The SF State portal environment has been architected to allow automatic creation of Lotus Sametime class groups, to give students IM access to everyone enrolled in a class instead of just the few people they sit by or already know. Thus, at eleven o’clock at night, a student could broadcast an IM message asking for help


or clarification on a particular topic from other 11th hour crammers in the same class. Furthermore, when instructors have created lecture materials in an electronic format, these materials can be stored in a common repository that students can access at any time. New Student Enrollment New students need a way to enroll and establish contact with people in the admissions office, student services, and financial aid offices. At SF State, students enroll through the university’s website. As soon as they are enrolled, students are automatically provisioned with a portal containing a Lotus Notes email account and Lotus Sametime capabilities including presence, IM, and Web conferencing. From within their individual portal, new students have immediate access to all the resources of the university community and can immediately collaborate, transact business, and join in university events. Distribution and Collection of Data Roles and processes apply not just to students, but also to staff. For example, administrators need to access budgetary information and the university needs to collect data from individuals. Using the SF State website, employees can view their benefit information through the convenience of the single sign-on portal; if they need to ask questions of a benefits representative, they can immediately collaborate with that representative. The university also uses the individual portlets to collect emergency contact information, including cellular telephone numbers, to enable more rapid response to emergency situations. Of course, the access to information is controlled by roles designations, but the tools for real-time collaboration are readily available to allow faculty and staff to share and discuss any information their roles give them access to. Time for Pizza The SF State ecosystem was designed not only for academic roles, but for extracurricular roles as well. Thus, the chess club or volleyball team members can be grouped in Lotus Sametime and team messages can be broadcast to everyone in the group — such as spontaneous posts like “the team is meeting in 30 minutes for pizza.” Many, many other examples could be cited of this virtual collaborative ecosystem, which is based on roles, process maps, the directory, and middleware integration. SF State has now internalized this methodology, and it is continually adding additional capabilities based on user roles and processes. We should also point out that in addition to surfacing Lotus Sametime and Lotus Notes capabilities in individual web portlets, many faculty and staff run both Lotus Notes and Lotus Sametime clients on their personal computers. Thus, each person can work how and where they please, and on their favorite device, regardless of whether they are using thick clients or web-based clients.


SF State’s Implementation The San Francisco State University collaborative ecosystem incorporates both IBM software and some third-party applications used by the university. The solution runs on IBM pSeries server hardware. A graphical representation is shown in the figure below.

CollaborativeEcosystem

IBM TivoliDirectory Server

IBM Lotus NotesIBM Lotus SametimeIBM Lotus Domino

Web Browser Desktops with Thick Clients

OraclePeopleSoft

IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory(development tool)

IBM WebSphere Portal (server)

Ruby onRails

Moodle

Solution includes 19 IBM pSeries Servers

RolesProcess M

aps

Directory

Mid

dlew

are

Figure 3: SF State’s collaborative ecosystem.

SFSU chose to map all roles to the Tivoli LDAP directory and Tivoli Access Manager. Both are used along with Tivoli Access Manager WebSEAL to authenticate users and send them to the correct pages and portlets in the Portal. Lotus Sametime and Lotus Notes require user data to be stored in the Lotus Domino directory. In the SF State implementation, Lotus Domino interacts with the shared user repository based on Tivoli Directory Server, but it also requires additional user information to be maintained in its own directory. In order to ensure consistent user data at any time, Tivoli Directory Integrator is used for initial user provisioning into Lotus Domino as well as other systems, and it assures that user data is continuously synchronized between Lotus Domino and the Tivoli directory servers. Lotus Sametime builds on top of the shared Lotus Domino and Tivoli Directory services to maintain user and group authentication. In this ecosystem, the IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory was used to create personalized portlets, based on user roles and process flows. The portlets are served up through IBM WebSphere Portal. The highly mobile SF State students, faculty, and staff all have browser access to Lotus Sametime and Lotus Notes through browser-based Java applets. These


applets are downloaded automatically, giving everyone thin client functionality. Whenever a person is up on an SF State portal page that displays an SF State email address, the email address turns bold green, which signals to user that he or she may initiate a Lotus Sametime chat with that person whose email address is displayed. Many faculty and staff members also use the Lotus Sametime and Lotus Notes thick clients on their office computing devices. In addition, third-party multi-protocol IM tools like Trillian, that are already widely deployed to connect to MSN, Yahoo! or AOL, can be used for instant messaging by students and staff. Trillian integrates with Lotus Sametime and plays fine in the SF State collaborative ecosystem. In the SF State implementation, security is strong because the solution seamlessly integrates with the existing [Tivoli LDAP directory], employing all of the security mechanisms inherent to this software. Other solutions would have required SF State to build an extra user repository directory with the accompanying effort to develop middleware and logic to maintain data integrity. By working with the existing LDAP directory, the users rely on the same user id and password for all their web applications, including their individual portlets, Lotus Notes email, and Lotus Sametime IM and web conferencing.


The Impact to SF State The SF State collaborative ecosystem is extending the boundaries of the SF State community beyond the physical campus to help people connect, share ideas and thoughts at any time and from any place. It enables students to develop whole relationships with others: classmates, faculty, administrators and the SF State community at large, connecting people on campus as well as from remote locations. This facilitates the human engagement vital to the dynamism that defines the San Francisco State University educational community.

“The IBM systems actually did what

they said they would do.”


Lessons Learned SF State has learned a great number of lessons by implementing its collaborative ecosystem. The following tips will be useful to other organizations who want to enhance their business processes with integrated communications and collaborations capabilities. 1. Define Roles and Processes The SF State methodology of defining roles and then the processes associated with those roles has been extremely helpful. In fact, it has now become almost automatic. If anyone wants a new capability, the procedure is

• Define the role • Map the relevant processes (including the data triggers) • Augment the directory • Implement the middleware

With the infrastructure and IBM portal technology SF State uses, creating these new roles, processes, and data flows is straightforward. And because the roles and processes define the communication needs, enabling the processes by use of Lotus Sametime presence, instant messaging and Web conferencing and Lotus Notes email is simple. 2. The Importance of the Directory A robust LDAP directory with accompanying authentication and security capabilities is critical. Not all LDAP directories and databases are created equally. Care should be taken concerning which directory is selected4. 3. Single Sign-on (SSO) Systems should be modified so that users can access any data source or system resource they are authorized to use with a single sign-on. This simplifies process flows and makes a more satisfied user. 4. Automated Provisioning Before SF State implemented its new collaborative ecosystem, its processes for provisioning user accounts and data access permissions were cumbersome, being performed manually as requests came in. However, with so many people using the system, and with so much churn, it was very difficult for the IT department to keep up with the requests and changes. With the new system, any process step that can be automated is automated. If people can do self-service provisioning using an automated process, this process is created, based on those people’s roles. If data already exists somewhere else in some other system or database, it is retrieved so that: 1) users do not have to enter data twice, and 2) data elements are not replicated and inconsistently modified in multiple systems. 5. Implement an Ecosystem, Not a Standalone Product SF State could have implemented Lotus Sametime as a standalone solution, and it would have had an excellent platform for instant messaging, presence awareness, and Web conferencing. However, a standalone solution is not really a unified solution, and it is not what SF State wanted. To truly create a unified communications and collaboration solution, there must be tight integration between 4 For more information on LDAP and LDAP directory considerations see LDAP: Framework, Practices, and Trends, by Vassiliki Koutsonikola and Athena Vakali, IEEE Internet Computing, September ● October 2004, pp. 66 – 72. Note the section on “Choosing an LDAP Server” for performance issues one should consider when selecting an LDAP directory. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/4236/29479/01336746.pdf?arnumber=1336746


http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/iel5/4236/29479/01336746.pdf?arnumber=1336746

an individual’s roles, the applications that person uses, processes, and data. In short, communication and collaboration must be integrated with the processes, data, and systems that make an organization work. 6. Have Patience with the Naysayers SF State embodies a tradition of independent thought and freedom of choice — a value that is often exercised in the arena of IT tools as well. The Division of IT did not impose the use of Lotus Sametime and Lotus Notes as the only real-time communication and collaboration standard throughout the university, though use of them has grown by viral adoption as the system’s rich capabilities are exposed. Extensive effort was required to ensure that the new solution could co-exist with alternative systems. 7. Enable Multiple Access Methods We live in a world of wireless and handhelds. Nobody wants to be out of contact, whether it is students, faculty, or staff. Ninety percent of the people using the SF State system are connected via laptops and BlackBerrys. To enable anywhere use, SF State has Wi-Fi-enabled the entire campus. Furthermore, people connect using a variety of methods and devices. The solution needs to support as many devices, browsers, third-party IM and email systems, as possible. 8. Do Not Expect to Save Money… Now Implementing a unified communications solution or a collaborative ecosystem will likely not save an organization IT CAPEX or operating costs. However, the total cost of ownership will likely be lower over the total life of the solution. The real benefit is in creating a solution that enables people to communicate easily with people and to create a sense of community. This in turn has enabled the university to achieve its mission of creating an academic environment where a commuter student body has more and better opportunities to learn by making faculty and staff more available, classmates contactable with the click of a mouse, syllabus information easy to get to online, and student data and information readily accessible. 9. Finding the Right Skill Set Finding staff with the right skill sets to support a collaborative communications environment is very important. Anyone running an IT organization or data center needs to think about the resources they will need internally to support the solution. SF State has needed to recruit broadly to find qualified people for proper staffing.


Futures The communications and collaboration journey continues at SF State, with many new capabilities being worked on. For example, integrating the telephone system with Lotus Sametime was not a priority initially, because so many other benefits accrued without that. SF State is now looking at implementing click-to-dial, click-to-conference, and the other mid-call control functions available in Lotus Sametime when it is integrated with a telephony system. SF State is also investigating the integration of the video capabilities in Lotus Sametime with those of video partner companies to enable fully interactive video between instructors and students who may attend a lecture or a help session remotely. The university is investigating use of the Lotus Sametime Web conferencing capabilities for remote/distance learning. Key features include session recording and the highly collaborative approach, allowing participants to provide instant feedback through instant messaging. SF State will allow guests to participate with one-click entry. SF State has developed a process for integrating communications and collaboration into the everyday fabric and business of education. The IBM software, hardware, and services SF State chose allowed the university to architect and build a 21st century collaborative ecosystem designed for the educational needs of today’s urban student. This solution has been crafted upon a foundation that offers the flexibility and openness to innovate and evolve as the needs of the university community — its students, faculty, and staff — evolve and change.

Author’s Note: All quotes in this article are real and unsolicited. They are extracted from unrehearsed interviews with SF State employees between August and November 2007.


About IBM Founded in 1888, International Business Machines Corporation is a multinational computer technology and consulting corporation that manufactures and sells computer hardware and software, and offers infrastructure services, hosting services, and consulting services in areas ranging from mainframe computers to nanotechnology. With over 350,000 employees worldwide, and revenues of over $90 billion annually, IBM is the largest information technology employer in the world. For more information, visit IBM at www.ibm.com.

About Wainhouse Research Wainhouse Research (www.wainhouse.com) is an independent market research firm that focuses on critical issues in unified communications and collaborative technologies including IM, presence, audio conferencing, web conferencing, mobility, videoconferencing, and streaming media. The company conducts multi-client and custom research studies, consults with end users on key implementation issues, publishes white papers and market statistics, and delivers public and private seminars as well as speaker presentations at industry group meetings. Wainhouse Research publishes a free newsletter, The Wainhouse Research Bulletin, as well as a number of reports detailing the current market trends and major vendor strategies including Telephony-based Unified Communications 2007 and IBM’s Unified Communications and Collaboration Strategy, and Microsoft’s Software-Powered Unified Communications Strategy.

About the Author E. Brent Kelly is a Senior Analyst and Partner at Wainhouse Research. He has authored numerous reports and articles on unified communications, has spoken at industry events and trade shows, and has developed seminars on implementing unified communications technologies. Mr. Kelly has a Ph.D. in engineering from Texas A&M and a B.S. in engineering from Brigham Young University. He can be reached at [email protected].


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Communications-Enabling the Business of Education• IBM WebSphere Portal 6 • IBM WebSphere Web Content Management System 6 • IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory 6 Others • Ruby on