[Koha] Question about Active Directory integration

[Chris Cormack]

* Coehoorn, Joel (jcoehoorn at york.edu) wrote:
> We're a small college library in the process of migrating to Koha from an
> old Winnebago Spectrum system. The plan is that students should be able to
> use their Active Directory credentials when access Koha. I have the
> connection working, but there are some things I'm not clear on.
> 
> For many students, their first and only account interaction with Koha will
> be when they bring an item to the circulation desk. At this point, if the
> attendant scans their card and they have never logged in, my understanding
> is that Koha will have no idea who they are and will reject the
> transaction, because it doesn't create the account until someone tries to
> authenticate. Is there any way to have Koha pro-actively pull this
> information? I'd rather avoid the extra step of batching users into Koha
> each term.
>
Not in current Koha code no, but you could write (or get someone to
write) a feature that would talk to LDAP (or Active Directory) when it
sees a borrower it doesn't know about to create that borrower in Koha.
So when they scan their card at the circulation desk it creates the
borrower by pulling the info from LDAP. It will need to be a system
preference so only libraries wanting it have it on of course.

This wouldn't actually be a huge amount of work, and I think would be
something many libraries would like. You would definitely get a nice
credit for getting this done.

Chris

> Also, for anyone else using Active Directory, are you storing the Card
> Number in Active Directory? If so, what field are you using?
> 
>   Joel Coehoorn
> Director of Information Technology
> York College, Nebraska
> 402.363.5603
> jcoehoorn at york.edu
> 
> 
> 
>  *The mission of York College is to transform lives through
> Christ-centered education and to equip students for lifelong service to
> God, family, and society*
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-- 
Chris Cormack
Catalyst IT Ltd.
+64 4 803 2238
PO Box 11-053, Manners St, Wellington 6142, New Zealand