1. Enterprise Portal Presentation
Miami-Dade County Public Schools

2. MDCPS Background Fourth largest school district
Over 340 public schools; over 80 Charter schools
Serving 2,400 square miles
Over 340,000 students
Over 45,000 employees; over 5,000 Charter employees
Services 180 different home languages
Mobility rate – 27%
Declining enrollment - Declining enrollment ($97). • Economic slowdown - State funding ($32.2).
• Total funding decrease from FY 05 to FY 08 ($341.2).

3. The Big Picture The Vision
Have all users connected to all information at anytime
The Challenges
Schools under state sanction
Need to increase parental involvement
Giving our users access to their systems in one area
Providing our parents an easy and consistent way to monitor their child’s progress
Connect silo systems
Reduce paper-based systems
Provide easy and consistent access to information

4. MDCPS Foundation
Active Directory Account and Auto Update – MIIS and ILM
Password Synchronization – P-Synch
District – Outlook Exchange
District wide Gradebook – Global Scholar / Excelsior
Metro Ethernet to each remote site
Patch Management and Virus Protection – Big Fix and Sophos
Data Warehouse – Microsoft SQL
OLAP (On-line Analytical Processing tool) - Cognos
Self Service for Technology Support - HEAT
Technology accelerators, technology creator
PSYNC
Cognos

5. MDCPS Foundation District-wide federated library catalog -Destiny
District-wide assessment tool – Edusoft
District-wide instructional applications, including
Riverdeep Destination Series
Voyager Solo and Ticket to Read
Jamestown Navigator
Plato Learning
Library Reference Databases-Groliers, SIRS, Gale, Facts on File, etc
District-wide test generator - ExamView
Technology accelerators, technology creator
PSYNC
Cognos 5

6. Implementation/Timeline
Business Partners
Food Service
Links to Learning
Teacher Assessment
Volunteer
SAP SOS
Employee Self-Service
SharePoint 2010
Attendance
Intervention
SPOT
SES
Weekly Briefing
Internship
Professional Development
RiverDeep
Unified Communications (OCS)
District and Community Deployment; Global Registration System
Enterprise Portal
Infrastructure and Employee Portal with Collaboration
Portal Lite May 1, 2006

7. Decision Making Process
Key Criteria
Existing infrastructure and skill sets
Scalability
Technology partners and third party services
Flexibility
Rapid Development
Why SharePoint?
Experience with Microsoft Products
Mature Microsoft Exchange Environment (ADS)
Successful Portal “Lite”
Established Personnel and Student Data Warehouse
Microsoft Platform throughout District
Good Partner Relationship with Microsoft

8. The Solution - www.dadeschools.net
Parents
Students
Community
Employees

9. Lessons Learned on Portal Deployment

10. Lessons Learned Portal Lite
Over Estimating Services, Under Estimating Staff
Over Estimating Community and Parents Technical Awareness
Mapping and Establishing Environments Beforehand
Change Control in Place
Getting all Parts to Work Together
Limited best practice for MOSS as it as a new product
Deployment issues (test -> staging -> production)
No build process

11. Portal Infrastructure and Build

12. Overview Active Directory Environment
Historically decentralized AD environment
Portal project coincided with AD migration project
DMZ forest was created for student and parent accounts
Initially intended for web applications only 12

13. Initial Infrastructure Build
Environment architecture and design
Security architecture and certificates
Hardware sizing and implementation
Active Directory Schema modifications
Database architecture and build
Data Warehouse interface and data positioning
Development and Integration environments
Active Directory provisioning and replication

14. Hardware 14

15. Replication Topology 15

16. Account Creation and Management
Dynamic Provisioning into AD
Guardians identified with a PIN and questions about the student
Guardians linked to student as an attribute
of the AD user object
Password self-reset
M-Tech’s P-Synch software used
Users register challenge Q&A for self reset 16

17. Single Sign-On
Version 3 single sign-on (Web SSO) technology used for transparent access to resources
An overlaying system of session tickets allow uses to login once and access disparate applications 17

18. Storage and Backup Backup Strategy
20 TB fiber channel SAN space allocated for the portal
20 TB lower cost FATA drives allocated as a staging area
Staging area is backed up nightly to a tape library
Selected collaboration sites are kept on different retention schedules 18

19. Resources to Maintain
2 System Administrators – handle all updating to environments
2 Exchange Specialists (Part time)
1 Database Administrator (Part time)
3 .Net Developers
1 Network Analyst (Part time)