REDMOND, WA, July 28, 2009 — Single sign-on became a reality when Lake Washington School District (LWSD) announced the first implementation of Microsoft code name “Geneva” technology in a K-12 environment. LWSD is located between Lake Washington and the Cascade Mountains, to the east of Seattle, and serves over 23,700 students. The goal of the project is to simplify student, teacher and parent access to school district applications by enabling single sign-on and role based authorization.
Using Tandem for Schools, the popular online events management and calendaring solution
from Intand Corporation as the pilot application, LWSD took the first step in realizing the dream of
school districts everywhere; to ensure the security and privacy of vital information needed by district
students and families with simplified, user-friendly access.
“Tandem for Schools has solved a problem for our district. Before we discovered Tandem for
Schools the only way to know what events were planned at our 48 campuses was to call or be on their
mailing lists. As of December 2008, all of our 48 schools use Tandem for Schools to calendar events and
to display them on school websites. Parents often have children who attend different schools and now
with Tandem for Schools, LWSD parents can subscribe to each school’s calendar and can keep up to date
on school events without having to visit each school website. We are convinced that Tandem for Schools
has resulted in increased parent participation in school events,” says Dr. John Vaille, LWSD Chief
Technology Officer.
Microsoft code name “Geneva” is an open platform that provides simplified access and single
sign-on for on-premises and cloud-based applications in the enterprise, across organizations, and on the
Web – hosted by Microsoft or others. With “Geneva,” organizations gain flexibility and cost savings
while avoiding the access management challenges of managing extra user accounts and passwords.
“Microsoft is pleased to work with Intand to help LWSD provide its students, teachers and
families with simple, secure access to educational resources and tools,” said John Chirapurath, Director
in the Identity and Security Business Group at Microsoft. “’Geneva’ is part of Microsoft’s Business Ready
Security strategy. It supports the strategy’s tenets of ‘integrating and extending security across the
enterprise’ and helping to ‘protect everywhere, access anywhere’ through interoperability with third
party solutions.”
Tandem for Schools is an online event and facility management and calendaring solution hosted
by Intand Corporation, built by a school for schools. Tandem for Schools eliminates multiple calendars
and scheduling conflicts at schools and district offices, delivers real-time event updates to personal
calendars for staff, parents and students, and enhances school and district web sites.
“It is rewarding to see the Lake Washington School District use Tandem for Schools to manage all
of the events in their facilities, while connecting with their parents, students and teachers over the web,
in an extremely safe and secure way. Partnering with Microsoft on the ‘Geneva’ server program
demonstrates our dedication to both cutting edge technology as well as best practices in internet
identity safety. Tandem for Schools can help school districts keep their schedules conflict-free and help
families connect to more school events. Intand’s implementation of this new single sign-on ‘Geneva’
Server technology will ultimately result in lowering the administration costs associated with managing
multiple types of web applications in a large school district setting. In challenging times like these, more
and more school districts are searching for innovative ways to reduce costs, maximize productivity and
streamline internal operations. Implementing applications that leverage this new state of the art
technology would be a very good place to start,” said Bryan Otis, President and Co-Founder of Intand
Corporation.