Studentnet Cloudburst

30 January 2015


Studentnet wants to thank all of our client schools that have worked with us to complete the migration to Version 2 of Cloudwork. The 2014-15 Christmas-New Year period has been especially busy for the Studentnet team in that not only did we have a record number of new school account implementations but we also had to migrate all of our existing schools onto Version 2. We'd like to issue a very big Thank You for your patience and perseverance in working with us to achieve this major milestone.

So now it's time to see why it was all worthwhile! Welcome to our first Cloudburst for 2015 and to an easier future for managing your hundreds of school accounts.
  • V2 Upgrade Migration - Congratulations! Just about all of you have completed the migration to Version 2
  • V2 Dashboard - Our new Dashboard delivers to you more information and greater control of your accounts
  • Emergency Contacts for Studentnet out of hours - Something not working? Ring our NOC on (02) 9281 3905 24x7!
  • Convert your departing year 12s to alumni accounts - Reminder convert your accounts now - alumni accounts are free!


V2 Migration - we're (mostly) done

One by one we've migrated just about all of our school clients from version 1 to our new version 2. This has been a huge labour of love that started in early December, 2014 and is finishing up now in the last week of January, 2015.

Version 2 is a total re-write in Python of the PHP based V1 written in 2007. The move from PHP to Python was prompted by a series of performance bottlenecks that had developed over the 7years of great service V1 delivered. In addition, V2 dramatically improves the underlying data structures used to maintain your identity data. With V2 we aim to:
  • Improve visibility of configuration and identity data and meta-data
  • Increase automation, meaning less manual intervention for you and for Studentnet staff
  • Give you greater control of your identities and installations
  • Expand your range of reports based on our improved logging
In a few weeks' time, we'll contact you each again to remove the old v1 servers from your firewall rules.


Cloudwork V2 Dashboard

The V2 Dashboard is your point of control for your identity management services. It is our mechanism to deliver to you greater control and more information about your school's accounts and how they are being used.

As part of the V2 migration each school received a bespoke migration document that included the URL for you to gain access to the Dashboard. The URL should take the form of: https://schoolname.cloudworkengine.net.

This initial version of the Dashboard provides you with fundamental identity management information such as number of accounts, number and structure of groups, Google domains, and organisational units.

As an example of increased control in your hands delivered by the V2 Dashboard look at how easy it is to now convert your departing students to be alumni accounts (see below).

To learn more about our exciting new V2 Dashboard, you can find the Cloudwork Dashboard User Manual here: http://studentnet.net/info/Cloudwork_User_Manual.pdf
To have a play with the dashboard in our demonstration facility visit here: https://demo-login.cloudworkengine.net/ using the credentials:
user: demonstration
password: d3m0user


Emergency Contact for Studentnet - out of hours

The easy thing to remember is that if you experience any outage of Studentnet services out of hours simply ring our NOC on (02) 9281 3905, 24x7. However, we'd like you to bear in mind some points:
  • Studentnet WANTS to know immediately of any disruption to your service. We maintain a high degree of sophisticated monitoring of our services but even with that in place it is no substitute for your actual frontline experience. If there is an outage, don't hesitate to contact us.
  • The NOC contact number is reserved for emergency outages of an operational nature ONLY.
  • The NOC contact number should not be used for assistance in configuring services or making product feature enquiries. It is NOT a help facility.
  • If the NOC emergency facility is used for any purpose other than an emergency operational outage, an out of hours configuration charge of $250exGST/hr, minimum of 1 hour flag fall will apply.
  • No charge is applied for the reporting of genuine operational outages of an emergency nature to the NOC contact number.


Convert your departing year 12s to alumni accounts

As we all prepare for the forthcoming 2015 academic year please remember to prepare your list of departing year 12 students so that their accounts can be converted from active student accounts to alumni accounts. Remember alumni accounts are provided free of charge. Just like parent accounts, they are not chargeable. Converting your accounts help keep your costs down and is easy to achieve with the V2 Dashboard.

To convert your departing students into alumni accounts using the V2 Dashboard you can either:

  1. Set up a container in AD to hold all of your alumni and move the departing student accounts into that container. Use your V2 Dashboard sync profile controls in Cloudwork to ensure that the alumni container is marked with a User Setting Role of "Alum".
  2. Or - if your departing students are in a year group container in AD, simply use the V2 Dashboard to upgrade the User Settings Role field of that container's Sync Profile to now be "Alum".
Let us know if you have any questions on using either of these techniques and we'll be happy to assist.


Thanks for your attention - we're looking forward to welcoming all of our new schools and to delivering more power and control over your accounts to our existing school clients in 2015.

Looking forward to delivering to more to come in 2015!
The Studentnet Team

STUDENTNET®     ABN 90 001 966 892
Suite 1, 89 Jones St, Ultimo NSW 2007, Australia
Email: info@studentnet.net     Site: studentnet.net
Tel +61 2 9281 1626         NOC +61 2 9281 3905
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