The client has head quarters in UK and offices in Europe, Asia/Pacific and US. The client provides an education portal solution throughout the United Kingdom with an objective of extending learning into the wider community. Wipro designed and implemented the Community Intranet Portal. The organization provides education solution throughout UK -- from primary schools to universities and from classrooms to homes. The objective is to extend learning into the wider community. The Internet and Intranet solutions are tailored specifically for schools and learning communities. They deliver high speed Internet and Intranet access with Internet applications, educational content and home-school access. The details of the portal can be seen in the table below.

The challenge was to design and implement a directory service that would provide a single login point and authenticate users to applications they have been granted access to. The directory services had to be integrated with the existing provisioning application.

Database design had to satisfy the immediate requirements with the capability to meet future expansion. Quick response time has to be provided in an environment that supported thousands of concurrent client requests.

The broad challenges:

	Need of education solution throughout UK (to cover schools in the beginning).
	Extending learning out into the wider community.
	Private intranet architecture with secure access.
	Scalable architecture for 5000 schools across 30 communities.
	Home - school access.

Wipro's product selection methodology and strategic approach resulted in an efficient solution for Internet community portal.

Wipro deployed Oracle Internet Directory (OID) on Solaris 7 for directory services.

Oracle LDAP was designed and integrated with the existing provisioning system. Provisioning system was implemented to have the following functionality:

	Create a new Local Education Authority (LEA) community
	Modify properties of an existing community
	Provide delegated administration capability to LEA for routine maintenance
	Reporting tools

The solution consisted of the Intranet portal application utilizing Perl and LDAP v3 protocol to communicate with the Oracle LDAP server. Perl was used to authenticate user against the user id and password using the Oracle Internet Directory (OID) information. The design incorporates 'high availability' too.