The Challenge: Simplifying Complex Account Management for an Adult Public Charter School
A public charter school providing adult education faced a significant administrative hurdle. With a growing student body and a diverse staff, the school was managing user accounts across multiple platforms, including Google and Microsoft environments.
The manual process of onboarding and offboarding students was time-consuming, taking approximately 15 minutes per user across different systems. For an organization with hundreds or even thousands of students, this represented a massive drain on productivity, and a large cost for IT support.
Furthermore, students struggled to remember multiple sets of credentials for various educational apps, creating barriers to learning and increasing the volume of help desk tickets. The school leadership recognized they needed a more robust, secure, and user-friendly way to manage digital identities without adding complexity for their non-technical users.
The Solution: Strategic IT Planning and Automated Provisioning via Clever SSO
Community IT Innovators has served as a long-term technology partner for this school, allowing our team to understand their unique culture and operational needs. To address the account management challenge, the Community IT Business Manager (ITBM) recommended and implemented a Single Sign-On (SSO) solution using Clever.
The solution was selected for its proven success in K-12 and adult education environments. Clever also has the advantage of being an industry standard SSO solution, so staff and parents were familiar with it, and Community IT also has previous experience implementing Clever. Using standard and reputable solutions helps nonprofits save costs because they are not locked into a single consultant for a highly customized product.
By leveraging the expertise of the IT Business Manager—who combines technical depth with strategic business thinking—Community IT implemented a system that integrated the school’s existing Student Information System (SIS) with their cloud platforms.
Key technical projects included:
- Automated User Provisioning: We established a zero intervention workflow. When a student is enrolled in the SIS, the system automatically triggers account creation in both Google and Microsoft environments.
- Centralized Identity Management: Using Clever as the primary identity provider, we created a single point of access for all school-approved applications, including Zoom, Slack, and various approved learning tools. The Clever SSO environment prevents unauthorized apps and protects students from malware.
- Device Integration: We tied the SSO platform to the school’s hardware, ensuring that Chromebooks and Windows devices (managed via Azure) recognized the same student credentials seamlessly.
- Simplified Compliance: We designed creative credentialing that met modern security standards—requiring complex passwords—while remaining easy for students to remember a single login. Our helpdesk is always available for forgotten passwords—but tickets clearly go down when there is only one password to forget.
The Result: Enhanced Security and “Zero Ticket” Implementation
The implementation of the SSO project has been an overwhelming success, defined by a dramatic reduction in administrative friction and a significant boost to the school’s security posture.
By automating the provisioning process, the school saved hundreds of hours previously spent on manual data entry. More importantly, the offboarding process is now instantaneous; when a student departs, closing their central account immediately secures all linked platforms, a critical step in maintaining organizational cybersecurity.
From the user perspective, the transition was seamless. Because many staff members were already familiar with the Clever platform from other educational contexts, adoption skepticism was minimal. The project achieved the ultimate goal in technology implementation: a successful rollout with virtually zero help desk tickets from the student body.
“In technology, when nobody complains, it means you were successful. We know this project was a success because we had almost zero tickets.
By automating the connection between the student information system and the cloud, we achieved three things at once: a win for cybersecurity, a win for ease of onboarding, and a win for saving time and money.”
– Norwin Herrera, Community IT
Ready for a Nonprofit Technology Partner that Works with You?
Community IT understands that successful IT projects are built on trust and long-term partnership. We don’t just manage help desks; we provide the strategic guidance necessary to help nonprofits and schools navigate the changing technology landscape. Our goal is always to implement solutions that save you time and money, allowing you to focus entirely on your mission.
Community IT’s strategic guidance, proactive approach, and implementation-specific teams with great depth and varied technical expertise helped this client realize their technology goals.
Community IT was able to help the client move to the right Single Sign On cybersecurity solution for their learning environment. We are always ready to support our clients to face their real needs and constraints. We use our IT and nonprofit expertise to guide clients as they navigate their changing IT needs, as shown in this Single Sign On (SSO) Case Study. You can be sure we are dedicated to the success of your mission and will help you find the solution that fits you.
As advocates for using technology to work smarter, we’re practicing what we recommend. This article was drafted with the assistance of AI, but the content was reviewed, edited, and finalized by a human editor to ensure accuracy and relevance.
Photo by Resume Genius on Unsplash