The billing system is not just a tool for collecting money, it's also a management tool.
The starting point for many schools is simple: students charge fees for online use, and not for the unpaid ones. This starts well, but it can do much more than that."Collect."This one.
In practice, the system often carries out both online behavior management, student access strategy control, unusual account monitoring, and a review of the performance of the function.
Several specific functional dimensions deserve careful assessment before going online.
Real name certification and account management. Can you get to every student?
The campus network accounts correspond to the true identity of students, which is a basic requirement for compliance. But the real name certification is not really going anywhere, depending on whether the system connects to the school’s unified identification platform.
Many schools have a student profile, and one of the school's cartoons has a student profile, but the billing system is another separate account.
The function of the billing system and the school ' s unified identity platform, which is automatically created and cancelled through LDAP or RADIUS protocols, is simple to say, but many programmes are located with more than expected capacity to match their docking workloads, mainly on interface standards and data fields. If this is not clearly discussed during the selection phase, the problem will hang up when it gets online.
The Internet strategy is graded and flexible by region and identity
The campus network's Internet strategy is not."All of them."Or..."All off"It's so simple.
For example, the strategy of dormitories is different from that of teaching districts, where only teachers ' accounts may have access to the extranet and students can only visit the inner and partial outlet; public areas of libraries may allow temporary account numbers, which are not measured in a way that differs from accommodations; certain equipment in laboratories may require specific IP binding and cannot be changed at will.
These scenarios mean that the system supports a strategy for fine particle size: regional, identity-based, time-bound configuration. The more sophisticated a hitable label is, the more flexible it is, and less expensive for a carrier.
We're gonna need to get a lot of help from the security crew.
Student response"The net is slow."and"I can't get on the net."The two types of complaints that are most commonly received by the operators. The path to screening for both types of problems is quite different: slowness may be an inadequate bandwidth for exports, a possible equipment bottlenecks or a large number of downloads from an account; failure to access the network may be a default account, a failure in authentication, and a physical circuit malfunction.
The billing system would be much more efficient to check for operators if it provided a clear account status online, traffic usage trends, and authentication logs. But this presupposed that the monitoring interface of the billing system was working well, data updates were real time, and queries were quick. Many vendors wrote in their programs."Smart Monitor"But the actual interface is rough, the data particles are thick and there are still orders to check logs if problems arise.
There's another common scene."The account was stolen."——Students report that they are not online but the account number shows them online.
You'll get a better student experience.
The account's in arrears, the traffic is running out, the account's offline.——In these cases, the number of complaints received by the carrier is much lower if the school gives it to the students.
But the premise of this feature is that the system requires a student contact and an effective delivery channel. Many schools use the micro-letter to send notices, which students are interested in before receiving. But it turns out in practice that: students have low interest rates, news drops are folded and notification is not accessible."It's on the way."The function.
In the end,
The system's selected. It can't just look at it."Can I charge you?"This dimension. More management functions are actually performed when you go online than originally planned. The actual ability to manage accounts, strategy configuration, monitor alerts and alert them is much less prudent than the ability to pick up a patch after you get on line.