Customer Case Study

Des Moines University
An Osteopathic Medical Centre in Des Moines, Iowa offering education programs in medicine, allied health care services, health care administration and public health. Students are provided with the knowledge and skills needed to become health care professionals dedicated to maintaining and restoring the health of their patients. The University also serves as a local, state and national resource for primary care physicians and associated health care providers.

Des Moines students have the usual requirements for web-based access but with an important addition. As part of their curriculum, students are required to go on ‘clerkships’ or ‘rotations’ at various medical facilities across the country. These on-the-job exercises involve up to 600 students at any one time and require the same access to content and functionality as local students. Any solution had to be secure, work across the Internet and from behind any number of Firewall configurations.

Des Moines implemented a Plumtree Software portal which provided students with web-based e-mail, content, applications, search and security. File access to internal network drives was initially handled by selected VPNs and dialups with MS networking, neither solution of which was considered acceptable. Experimentation with WebFolders was abandoned due to security concerns and lack of widespread acceptance. As a marginal workaround, students also e-mailed files to themselves as attachments.

Recently the university replaced these stop-gap measures with a FileWay™ Gadget integrated into the Plumtree portal. FileWay as a PlumTree gadget supports authentication via single sign on through active directory. User information is securely saved in the user preferences. All FileWay features and look-and-feel are maintained in the PlumTree gadget.

Now up to 1200 students can have secure access to their files and directories on the network servers from anywhere they have Internet access and a browser.

The following figure shows a typical screen-shot
for Plumtree FileWay integration

“FileWay is in the early stages of deployment and appears to offer the secure file access capability we have been seeking, without the security issues and headaches of widespread implementing VPNs.”

-- Mr. David von Arb, IT Manager at Des Moines University