The Visual Software Active Directory SIF Agent

This is an overview of of the Visual Software Active Directory SIF agent rule set for ZIAgent, its current capabilities and how it works with ZIAgent.  The VSI Active Directory agent is a plug-in to the ZIAgent SIF agent runtime.  If a school has the ZIAgent runtime, an Active Directory rule set is available for download.

Current Capabilities

The AD agent is capable of managing most aspects of an active directory schema, including:

• Creating / updating organizational units (OU’s).
• Creating / updating security groups.
• Creating / updating user accounts.
• Creating / updating home directories.

How Does This Plug-In Work?

ZIAgent is a configurable SIF agent.  We make it available in two versions:  a designer and a runtime version.  Once an agent is designed (using the designer version), it can be exported and it becomes portable.  This is useful for upgrading, since most of the time the configuration does not need to change from one SIF version to the next – all that is involved in the upgrade is <export from one version of the "agent shell" and import into the next>.  The second version is the ZIAgent runtime version.  On this one, we lowered the cost as much as possible and made the rule sets freely downloadable after that.

Structurally, the SIF agent runs under Windows Server IIS as a web site.  It installs via a MSI file and has a database that contains some configuration information and staged data received from the zone(s) the agent is registered in. This agent also employs a IIS-hosted web-service which is used for the actual interaction between the agent and active directory. This web-service is installed using a seperate MSI.

SIF Objects Supported

The default configuration of the AD agent includes support for these objects:

US 2.0r1

Subscriptions

• LEAInfo
• SchoolInfo
• TermInfo
• SchoolCourseInfo
• SectionInfo
• StudentPersonal
• StudentContact
• StudentSchoolEnrollment
• StudentSectionEnrollment
• StaffPersonal
• StaffAssignment
• EmployeePersonal
• EmployeeAssignment

Provisions

• Authentication

UK 1.1

Subscriptions

• LAInfo
• SchoolInfo
• TermInfo
• SchoolGroup
• SchoolGroupType
• LearnerPersonal
• ContactPersonal
• LearnerContact
• LearnerSchoolEnrolment
• LearnerGroupEnrolment
• WorkforcePersonal

Provisions

• Identity

Availability

Presently, this SIF agent rule set is available for the US 2.0r1 and UK 1.1 versions of the SIF specification as a downloadable plug-in to the ZIAgent Runtime SIF agent.