Staff & Pupil Intranet Portal

November 2009

Overview

Crosfields School’s Intranet portal was a largely unused static HTML site, with any updates having to be made manually by the Network Manager using Microsoft FrontPage, a discontinued product. This was replaced with a dynamic ASP.NET portal that allowed multi-user editing, pulling data from multiple sources, and including facilities for online room booking, fault reporting, pupil password resets, and more. The site became the default homepage for all staff and pupils.

Need

The school’s Intranet portal was in need of a redesign to bring together access to several disparate web-based internal systems, along with new functionality to assist with IT support processes and distribution of information by senior management and the IT Network department. The existing Intranet site was accessible only by typing the URL of a part-numeric server name, or by a previously-created Internet Explorer favourite. Updates were infrequent and had to be made manually using Microsoft FrontPage 2003. As a result, it was not widely used by either staff or pupils.

Room booking calendars were also available, but only as a read-only page. No self-service booking was available, which led to several voicemail and email messages each day to be actioned by the Network Manager.

Considerations

• The site should provide access to all existing web-based internal systems such as email, online registration, and room bookings.
• Access to other information not yet available electronically was highly desirable, such as school calendars and procedural documents such as the staff handbook.
• Select staff needed to be able to make their own updates to the Intranet without assistance from IT support.
• Both staff and pupils needed to use the same site, without exposing sensitive data to pupils.
• The new site needed to reduce the barriers to use by being as simple to access as possible.
• An online IT helpdesk system was required to allow self-service fault reporting and tracking of problems by IT support staff.

Solution

An ASP.NET solution was deployed onto the school’s existing IIS server. The site uses IIS automatic Negotiate/NTLM login to differentiate between staff and pupils users, dynamically generating content according to audience. The site was then enforced as the homepage for all users using Group Policy.

Functional highlights are:

Microsoft Exchange integration

Staff can see if they have unread messages in their inbox without having to access the webmail client, and the day’s events from the school calendar are pulled from a shared Exchange calendar. This functionality is integrated into the site using the Exchange Web Services Managed API.

News feeds

General school news and announcements from IT support are syndicated from other CMS servers using RSS and displayed on the home page using XSLT.

Room bookings

Self-service room booking are available for staff to reserve IT rooms and other shared areas.

IT Support portal

Service status information is available to staff, along with a support ticketing system to report and track IT problems. Status information is directly linked to reports from staff, so when a problem is reported, that computer’s health status is updated automatically.

Integrated web alerts system

New messages from the helpdesk, room booking, and staff cover systems are highlighted on every page of the Intranet portal, so time-sensitive messages are not missed if staff do not check email frequently. Incorporates Ajax to ensure messages arrive even when the user is not actively browsing.

IT Operations

An online inventory system allows IT staff to manage equipment down to the component level (e.g. serial numbers of peripherals and replacement parts) as well as tracking printer consumable usage.

Live data such as network card MAC addresses is pulled in to these views from a separate Lansweeper inventory system.

About Crosfields School

Crosfields School is an independent day prep school in Reading, UK. It currently has around 510 pupils aged 3-13. James Schlackman has been the Network Manager at the school since June 2009, supporting a network of around 140 workstations and 16 servers, based on Windows 7 and Server 2008 R2.