The following configuration steps are required to connect an external Directory Services user database to the School Loop system.
1. Employee ID's: Teachers and Students must have their unique district teacherID or studentID entered as an attribute in Directory Service. By default this is the "employeeid" attribute, but any attribute can be configured in School Loop to contain this value.
2. Department Code: All Directory Service users must have a "department" value. By default this is the "department" attribute, but any attribute can be used as long as the same attribute is used consistently across the district. For school users, this code must be the district school-code for the school. For district offices, this can be any unique value that is not a school code. School Loop can be configured with multiple department code values for a district office site.
3. Domain Names: School Loop will search a specified list of Directory Service domain names for users. If the district uses multiple domain names for users at the same school, please ensure that all user names are unique. In the case of duplicate user names, the first user activated will receive that name, but the other user will be displayed in the activation page with a conflict message. For example, given users jsmith@student.myschool.edu and jsmith@teachers.myschool.edu at MySchool, the first activated will get the user name jsmith and the other cannot be activated since School Loop usernames must be unique at each school. (The solution would be to change one of the user names in LDAP, or register one or the other users manually with a different username, in which case their accounts would not be synchronized with Directory Service.)
4. userPrincipalName: The userPrincipalName attribute contains the user name that will be used in School Loop, follow by @domainname. For example for userPrincipalName "SmithJ@district.k12.org", the resulting School Loop user name will be "smithj". (School Loop login is not case-sensitive).
