The Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA) (20 U.S.C. § 1232g; 34 CFR Part 99) is a Federal law that protects the privacy of student education records.
Planet Technologies’ FERPA Directory Compliance (FDC) solution aggregates the management of student user data and accounts and the security policies through an automation process in accordance to the Federal mandates required by FERPA policies. The Planet FDC Solution specifically integrates and packages the Automation Framework – Enterprise Edition and Microsoft Identity Integration Server 2003 (MIIS) to meet the change needs and auditing of the user data changes in relationship to the FERPA guidelines.
BENEFITS FOR ALL – Institutions, Students, Faculty and IT Departments
This powerful solution enables students, faculty and academic institutions to:
- Integrate or link between academic open systems directories and Microsoft Active Directory
- Allow students to control their user data of the public information such as global access listings, directories and student pages
- Allow students and faculty to manage their account directory data consistently, rapidly, and accurately
- Eliminate the processing of thousands of human transactions which can be fraught with possible errors
- Eliminate the countless hours and labor costs associated with compliance of the user data records as according to FERPA policy
- Provide functionality for logging for all student initiated actions and provide rollback capabilities
The comprehensive features of The Planet FDC Solution enable IT staff to:
- Audit changes to various accounts
- Perform automatic rollback of failed changed account directory processes
- Integrate with various account management systems such as
- Student Information Systems
- Student Accounting Systems
- Library Systems
- Active Directory
- Microsoft Exchange
- Delegate directory account rights to students and faculty from the IT administrator
The Planet Technologies FDC Solution can assist in allowing the student to manage the rights to public information and provide IT management & staff an automated method which provides security and ease of use.
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MANAGING FERPA POLICY IN A COMPLEX ENVIRONMENT
By FERPA policy mandates, academic institutions are required to give students:
- The right to access educational records kept by the school;
- The right to demand educational records be disclosed only with student consent;
- The right to amend educational records;
- The right to file complaints against the school for disclosing educational records in violation of FERPA.
Because of the need to comply to the FEPRA polices and allow the appropriate access and rights to the student and faculties directory information, academic institutions have a new workload associated with their network and management of those permissions.
Managing each of these user accounts can create considerable challenges:
- Auditing account data is difficult without data warehouses that track changes.
- No automatic rollback capabilities exist for management simplicity
- An incomplete view of users’ accounts when de-provisioning can create security vulnerabilities.
Managing directory information and changing for public information rights, passwords, resolving access issues, and assisting confused end users consumes time and resources.
