Knowledge Base

MIM 2016 reaches end of extended support on January 9, 2029, and critical components are already gone. For colleges and universities that built their identity infrastructure on MIM, this isn't just a software sunset. It's a chance to rethink whether an enterprise tool was ever the right fit for higher education.

Every IT administrator in education knows the feeling: a breach hits the news, and the first question from every principal, parent and school board member is the same: "Are our students’ data safe?"

In Part 1 of this series, we covered the authentication side of K–12 identity: portals, single sign-on, and federation, which are the layers that control how users log in and whether that access is secure. Now we turn to the lifecycle side: how accounts get created before users ever log in, and how those users end up in the right places once they're in the system.

If you've ever sat in a technology planning meeting and heard the words "SSO," "federation," "provisioning," and "rostering" used almost interchangeably, you're not alone.

In this post, we'll get practical: how do you evaluate your options, make the case to leadership, and know when a solution is genuinely worth the switch?

If you lead technology for a K-12 district right now, you're navigating two forces that don't care about each other: rising security demands and shrinking budgets. The pressure is real, and it's not going away.

RapidIdentity Cloud's new Unified Login brings account claiming, MFA enrollment, and authentication into one seamless, guided flow—reducing helpdesk burden and simplifying first-time login for students, faculty, and staff.

In the world of IT security, "Zero Trust" is the buzzword that just won't quit. We’re told to "never trust, always verify," which sounds great on a slide deck. But on a college campus with 30,000 students, 5,000 faculty members, and a rotating door of adjuncts and contractors, "verifying" everything manually is a recipe for a total system standstill.

You’ve invested in the heavy hitters. Whether it’s the governance power of SailPoint, the cloud-native reach of Microsoft Entra ID, or the agility of Okta, you have a world-class Identity and Access Management (IAM) strategy.

Since SB 820 was enacted in September 2019, Texas school districts must adopt cybersecurity policies, designate coordinators, and report breaches to TEA and affected families. Many districts face challenges meeting these requirements at scale, including thousands of devices, hundreds of staff accounts, and a changing student population.

Identity data stores in both K12 and Higher Education face unique complexities. This includes people with multiple affiliations (roles), data scattered across multiple systems, inconsistent data-entry practices that made identity matching a challenge, and identity attributes that don't fit neatly into a standard LDAP schema.

Behind every great university IT department is a legendary, 2,000-line Python script. It was likely written five years ago by a developer who has since moved on to a private-sector DevOps role, and it is currently the only thing syncing your Student Information System (SIS) data with your Jamf Pro environment.