West Coast R1 Public University

This R1 transitioned 1,000+ guests to access 400+ systems including Canvas and ServiceNow using the Cirrus social login and hosted identity solutions.

This large R1 public university did not want to continue to invest in further development of features for their existing Guest Management system and needed to improve reliability and  reduce technical and service desk support costs.   They decided to leverage the Cirrus Identity social login and hosted identity solutions.   This allowed improved automation of  the process for sponsors to request and manage access for thousands of guests who access over 400 websites and applications on campus including Canvas and ServiceNow.  By providing a non-social hosted identity option, the university was able to create access for international students that are unable to use some social providers.  The end result is that this university was able to retire their legacy guest system infrastructure, reassign development to higher priority projects while also reducing support costs.

Their initial use cases was to reduce the overhead associated with the Guest Management that allowed Instructor sponsors to request access to their Canvas LMS for guest lecturers, visitors or some students. Guests can now follow an intuitive process to select either a Google account/password or a branded “Other Login” option hosted by Cirrus Identity.  After the initial Canvas implementation, over 400 other applications and websites were also able to benefit from the new guest management system.

Cirrus Identity partnered with this campus to determine the implementation approach to retire the existing Guest Management system.  To prepare for the Cirrus implementation, the campus first revised the guest attribute design in  their Person Registry.  

Once the registry work was complete, Cirrus and the campus deployed and configured the Gateway, Account Linking, Invitation, External Identity Provider, Proxy and modified the custom integration with LDAP.   The campus developed documentation for sponsors and guests and Cirrus helped with a smooth transition from the legacy guest account conversion to social login or the Cirrus hosted identity.  The campus rolled out the new system and processes by cohort over 4 months and retired the legacy system at the end of rollout.  All applications that allow guests can use the CAS SSO login screen.