Automating Home Folder Creation with Your Identity and Access Management System
The Condrey Corporation product that today is known as Senergy, got its start more than two decades ago as a project to automate the creation of user home folders as identity and access management (IAM) systems provisioned access to network applications.
Originally engineered to work with Novell Directory Services (later renamed Novell eDirectory) and Novell Identity Manager, the release of “Novell File System Factory” through Condrey Corporation’s first partnership OEM agreement, became a vital software component to organizations needing to grant its users network storage and access based on identity.
Over time, the capabilities of the technology have greatly expanded to support Microsoft Active Directory and any IAM system. Additional enhancements include an extensive set of management, security, and protection capabilities for network-stored files. The advancements in Senergy are too expansive to detail, but you can click here to access a flyer detailing many of the features added over time.
Despite all of these significant product enhancements, a sizeable number of our customers continue to use Senergy mainly for provisioning network home folders and shared folders and automating their cleanup. That’s because many of these organizations are school districts with thousands of students that need student network storage and access to class-specific network storage resources set up each academic year. Others are companies with employees whose roles frequently change and need access to role-specific network-stored files.
And having these tasks performed automatically saves a lot of money. A published IDC report in 2009 detailed how Novell Storage Manager (File System Factory was renamed to Storage Manager and later to File Dynamics) provided significant savings to a school district in Texas.
“With students changing grades and often even schools every year, with students entering the school district and graduating, and with movement of staff and faculty, the district ascertained that they were spending $5 to set up a new user and $2 per each change applied to the system. After deploying NSM [Novell Storage Manager], the cost of setting up a new user and making changes to existing users dropped below $1. If the number of changes occurring each year is taken into consideration, the school district was able to realize cost savings in the thousands.”1
If you’re needing automated network home folder and shared folder provisioning, then Senergy is your answer. And it doesn’t even require an identity management system to do so. But Senergy offers a lot more network file system management, security, and protection capabilities. To learn about these, visit our product website.
1Novell Delivers a New Way of Intelligently Managing Organizations’ File-Based Information, IDC, Noemi Greyzdorf, January 2009