Single Sign-On (SSO) for Education

The internet has become a crucial part of schools and educational institutes. With increased number of online resources in use, it is now a challenge for these institutes to manage logins for such a large number of users. Single Sign-On (SSO) for education allows students, teachers and administrators to instantly login to these resources, with just a single login to the dashboard.

Security is the most important aspect nowadays but you can’t compromise on user experience either, This is where SSO comes into the picture.Single Sign-On(SSO) is an authentication service that allows a user to access multiple applications using a single set of credentials. Using SSO the end user only has to remember one set of credentials to access all the applications.

How can we Help

Using miniOrange IDP which provides Single Sign-On (SSO) for education so users can access applications and resources using a single centralized interface. miniOrange provides SSO support to different authentication standards such as SAML, OAuth, OpenID Connect, CAS, Shibboleth, SWA(Secure Web Authentication) and many more.

We already support more than 4000+ applications out of the box such as Google Apps, Evernote, Moodle, MediaWiki, Office 365, Khan Academy, Dropbox and many more with support for newer applications added consistently.

Our IDP services will allow you to easily manage security for your environment without compromising the user experience.

Benefits of SSO

Minimize support queries

Give students, teachers, alumni and employees a simple online experience while minimizing queries related to authentication.

Manage users with ease

Add or remove users with just a few clicks, As you have to make changes in only one user directory rather than multiple sources.

User Life-cycle Management

Easily manage user life-cycle with transition of a user from one group to another. e.g. Student to Alumni, Under Graduate to Post Graduate

Security with ease

Use our services without a second thought. Let us worry about the Security and Privacy of users.

Extensible

With support to 4000+ applications already and growing, Scale-Up or Scale-Down adaption of applications without any hassle.

Platform Independent

Seamless access over all devices supporting a web browser.

For Teachers

Ease of locating resources. Reduced number of passwords. Increased Security.

For Students

No more forgetting passwords. Increased use of resources. Easy access to all services from a single portal.

Extensive App Integrations

Some of the Solutions provided by us

SSO using G-Suite as Identity Source

SSO into Sitefinity portal using MiniOrange IDP

SSO into Students Course Portal

1.SSO using G-Suite as Identity Source:-

One of the schools that approached us for SSO, were at the time using several different applications such as iSAMS, Seesaw, manageBac, Netsuite, Google WebApps.They needed one central place where they could access all these different application through only a single sign in.

MiniOrange IDP helped them to achieve this goal by providing one central authentication system based on SSO and using G-Suite as the identity provider. Using this centralized authentication system the users can now access a set of different applications from a central portal.

The above use-case was implemented using MiniOrange Identity Services as follows:-

Single Sign-On (SSO) for Education

A user tries to access one of the applications using the school/College portal. [Step 1]
He is then redirected to the MiniOrange End to Sign-in using his Credentials. [Step 2]
The user is authenticated at MiniOrange with Google as the identity source. [Step 3]
After successful authentication, the user is redirected back to the requested application with a user session set for the user at the School/College Portal. [Step 4 & 5]
After successful authentication, the user can now access any of the applications available on the portal without the need to login to each of them separately. [Step 6]

2. SSO into Sitefinity portal using miniOrange IDP:-

Another school that approached us for SSO uses Active Directory as the user store to store the credentials and user data. They use Sharepoint, OWA(Outlook Web App) and custom Azure applications for their use case. They also use Atlassian Jira Service Desk and Confluence.

They were building a new centralized web portal using Sitefinity CMS, which would act as a one-stop destination for all the users of their system. As all the authentication would take place at the Sitefinity portal which was built using ASP.net, MiniOrange provides an ASP.net connector to work with Sitefinity. Using this ASP.net connector we were able to perform SSO authentications at Sitefinity CMS.

The above use-case was implemented using MiniOrange Identity Services as follows:-

Single Sign-On (SSO) for Education flow

An end-user accesses the Sitefinity portal or tries to access one of the applications from the portal. [Step 1]
The user is redirected to the MiniOrange endpoint for authentication using the ASP.net connector. [Step 2]
MiniOrange endpoint validates the credentials submitted by the user with Active Directory as the identity source. [Step 3]
A session is set for that user and now he can access any of the applications provided by the Web Portal without the need of logging in to each of them separately. [Step 4 & 5]
On successful authentication at MiniOrange endpoint, the user is redirected back to the portal or the app he requested for. [Step 6]

Single Sign-On (SSO) for Educational Institutes