Seminole State College achieves faster provisioning and better visibility

Seminole State College of Florida, founded in 1965, is a full-service education provider in Central Florida. The college supports about 34,000 students and 1,500 employees with a lean IT team that covers a wide range of responsibilities. For Steven Donaway, Senior Systems Admin of Server Infrastructure, identity security became a growing priority as the college worked to automate lifecycle processes.

Before implementing SailPoint, the college relied on a combination of identity management software, scripted automation, and manual processes to manage lifecycle activities. An identity management platform managed part of the connection between PeopleSoft and Active Directory, while many downstream tasks relied on PowerShell scripts, while others were still tracked manually in Excel. That approach helped reduce manual effort over time, but it also created a fragmented process that was hard to maintain and even harder to troubleshoot.

“It felt like a black box,” said Donaway. “Whenever a business process changed and we needed to update something, our first thought was, ‘Do we need to bring in a consultant to fix this for us? We don’t know how to do it ourselves.’”

The college also faced a data visibility problem. Because the prior environment depended on curated SQL views and customized logic, IT often had to spend significant time tracing where a process broke down. If a student account was not created correctly, the team had to determine whether the issue started in PeopleSoft, in the view feeding the identity platform, or within the identity platform itself. That slowed resolution and made support more reactive than proactive.

The biggest business impact was time. Help desk staff received calls from students who did not have accounts, then escalated those issues to IT for investigation. What seemed like a simple account problem could quickly turn into 30 minutes or more of analysis just to identify where the user was stuck.

Provisioning also became harder to manage during high-volume periods. At the start of the fall and spring semesters, the college had to process thousands of student changes in a short window. Under the old model, average provisioning times during those peaks could stretch to 24 to 48 hours. That delay affected both end users and IT. Students and employees had to wait longer for access. IT staff had to monitor queues, investigate exceptions, and handle more support contacts during the busiest times of year.

Choosing SailPoint for flexibility and fit

As Seminole State evaluated alternatives, the team focused on a few non-negotiables. The new solution needed to be low-code or no-code enough for a small IT team to manage. It needed strong vendor support. It also needed to integrate with PeopleSoft, the college’s system of record.

That last requirement became especially important after the college spent several months evaluating other potential solutions that ultimately did not meet the institution’s integration needs. SailPoint stood out because it offered out-of-the-box connectors for PeopleSoft, Active Directory, and Entra, along with workflows that matched the team’s preference for a more visual, easier-to-manage approach. “For higher ed, the ability to integrate with and extract data from PeopleSoft was very important,” Donaway said.

Going live in six months

Seminole State began implementation work in January 2025 and went live in July 2025. For a higher education institution with a small internal team, that timeline represented strong time to value. Most source connections were set up quickly. According to Donaway, getting data from systems such as PeopleSoft, Active Directory, and Entra took only a few hours.

The heavier lift was translating years of institutional knowledge into a more structured identity governance model. The college knew what access different users needed and when, but much of that logic lived in people’s heads rather than in formal documentation. During implementation, the team worked to package those rules into SailPoint in a way that supported long-term governance.

Expanding automation across key systems

Today, SailPoint Identity Security Cloud supports Seminole State’s core lifecycle management processes across PeopleSoft, Active Directory, and Entra. The college uses it to automate joiner, mover, and leaver events and improve consistency in provisioning and deprovisioning.

The team has also expanded SailPoint into other systems. Using the web services connector, Seminole State has connected applications such as Zoom and Percipio, with Adobe to follow. This allows the college to manage access in platforms that previously sat outside its central lifecycle processes. Doing so has closed important security and operational gaps. In the past, a user might lose core directory access when leaving the college but still retain an account and data in a third-party system. Now, as more sources are brought into SailPoint, those systems are included in deprovisioning as well.

The college is also using SailPoint workflows to trigger actions around employee departures and role changes. When staff members leave, workflows help grant managers access to relevant OneDrive and SharePoint content and notify the help desk to recover equipment. For movers, workflows identify department and manager changes and kick off certification activity to review access.

Improving access visibility

With the Entra connector to SailPoint, Seminole State has gained much-needed visibility into Microsoft Teams, channels, and groups as access entitlements, closing an important gap in its previous system. This expanded view has made deprovisioning more complete when employees leave, ensuring collaboration access is removed along with other permissions. It has also improved the experience for returning users, such as adjunct professors, by preserving access history and making it much easier to restore the same access they had before. As a result, the team can now reprovision users faster and more accurately, with clearer insight into the user-facing access that was once difficult to track.

Delivering measurable results

Overall, Seminole State College has seen important operational and governance benefits with SailPoint. For example:

• The college now manages about 5,000 lifecycle state changes each month, spanning access for new students and employees, terminations, and reactivations.

• The college has seen a 20% reduction in weekly provisioning errors.

• There has been a 10% reduction in help desk call volume.

• During high-demand periods, provisioning times have dropped from 12 hours to 4 hours. That remaining four-hour window is driven largely by the PeopleSoft aggregation cycle, which processes roughly half a million accounts; without that dependency, provisioning is close to instant.

With lifecycle automation in place, Seminole State is looking ahead to the next phase of identity maturity. The college plans to onboard more applications, expand access requests, and shift more access decisions to business owners instead of IT.

Longer term, the team also sees strong potential for broader certification use and role-based access models at the department level.

For now, SailPoint has given Seminole State a more modern identity foundation, one that reduces manual work, improves visibility, and helps a small team support a large academic community more effectively.