Renovation of the Office 365 environment in Kyushu University: Integration of Account Management and Authentication

Abstract

Office 365 Education is a suite of cloud services for students and educators. Kyushu University has provided Office 365 accounts for all students and staff. The first generation of an environment for Office 365 provisioning in the university had several issues about associating between Office 365 accounts and member identifications of the university. All university members are randomly assigned unique identifiers by the central ID management system for using commonly in university-wide information services. Since the IDs are for internal use only, the first environment authenticated a user with another ID and password specific for Office 365. In addition, processes for assigning licenses and giving privilege to users of Office 365 depending on modifications to member information in the ID management system were not fully automated. This paper shows how we resolved problems integrating Office 365 into the ID management of the university by rebuilding the infrastructure. We configured a federated authentication system and developed a system for processing in events of the account life cycle.