Case

New login solution for the municipality of Odense

Challenge

In connection with the relaunch of the municipality’s employee portal, the 13,000 employees who are not daily working at a computer needed access to the portal using NemID as well as the access to connect to other systems to read and access data, without specifying their NemID credentials again.

Solution

In collaboration with Globeteam, Odense Municipality developed its own login solution FIOL (Federated Identity and Organization Solution), which is connected to NemLog-in. The solution is based on the federation product SafeWhere*Identify, which apart from enabling connection to NemID also connects to Odense’s internal Active Directory.

benefits

18.000 employees of Odense Municipality can with NemID get access to targeted news, relevant links and quick links to dedicated systems. The FIOL solution delivers significant efficiency gains for the local workflows, facilitates the work of the staff of the municipality of Odense, as well as simplifies user administration and support.

18,000 employees get easy access to targeted news and professional systems with a new login solution

In Odense it is not only the citizens who may serve themselves via the web. The municipality has just put a new joint login solution in operation, covering employees and citizens alike. It provides access to NemID and means that 18,000 people now have access to targeted news, relevant links and quick links to dedicated systems in the municipality’s employee portal. The new single, web-based login solution is based on SafeWhere* Identity, which is both connected to NemID (via NemLog-in) and Odense’s internal Active Directory.

Odense Municipality’s employee portal is the first of Odense’s many applications that has been connected to the single login solution called FIOL (Federated Identity and Organization Solution). Before this it was only the 5,000 administrative employees who had access to the employee portal.

With FIOL, the remainder of the roughly 13,000 employees who are not daily working at a computer, such as social and health assistants, teacher assistants and childminders, log into the portal with their private NemID account. The administrative staffs that are already connected to the network, can now automatically log on to FIOL with a simple click on a link.

The digitization is expected to deliver significant efficiency gains of the local workflows and facilitate the work of the staff of the municipality of Odense.

“Around 13,000 employees are not hooked up to the Odense Municipality’s network and typically access the portal from a private PC or a remote PC, for example at a conference. It was important that users outside our network could also log into the portal. But the question was how to access and manage rights?” says Allan Schiellerup Bager, Digitization Manager of Odense Municipality, and continues:

“The solution needed to establish who the users are and what data in the business applications that the employees were allowed access to. Another requirement was that the solution should be connected to NemLog-in in order to comply with requirements to use the common public components.”

One single log-in to the portal

In collaboration with the Globeteam consultancy, Odense Municipality developed its own login solution FIOL, which is connected to NemLog-in and which together with the users’ NemID today makes it possible for the last 13,000 employees to log on.

The FIOL solution is built on SafeWhere*Identify, a federation product, based on industry standards like SAML 2.0 and WS-Federation. SafeWhere*Identify provides access to easy integration between applications and all major types of login, including NemLog-in and NemID, which respectively act as keyhole and digital key to self-service on the staff portal.

“We chose SafeWhere*Identify from Globeteam because the federation product not only meets our short-term requirements, but also our long term needs. Besides the flexibility to connect to login providers like NemID, SafeWhere*Identify has the advantage that it is not tied to Active Directory (AD), which meant that we did not have to create 13,000 additional users in our AD, nor increase the cost of the project in relation to the purchase of additional Microsoft licenses “, says IT Architect Lars Nico Høgfeldt.

And there was not far from thought to action; “It took only 6 weeks from the time that we started until we in collaboration with Globeteam had developed the FIOL solution and gotten the solution up and running to everyone’s satisfaction,” says Peter Hauge Jensen, who is also IT Architect in Odense Municipality.”

”With FIOL we meet customer, business and management needs, while keeping the technical costs at a minimum"

Secure and personalized portal profiles

Security demands for the FIOL solution are high. FIOL first validates an employee’s NemID and local servers then receive a Social Security number, which is compared with the CPR numbers in APOS. APOS is Odense Municipality’s employee database storing employees’ basic information and organizational positions.

“In this way we ensure that a user is in fact an employee in the municipality of Odense. Otherwise no access will be granted. We also use APOS to manage access roles and customize the portal content to fit the rights of each user. This means that all employees meet a personalized front page, targeting their specific needs for information” says Lars Nico Høgfeldt and Peter Hauge Jensen adds: 

“When the employee is logged on with his NemID account, he can go directly from the employee portal into other systems that are connected to the NemLog-in Federation without providing his NemID credentials again. The portal today links directly to the employee’s digital mailbox on borger.dk. The next system to be linked up to FIOL within the year is an educational system that the employees will then also be able to access directly from the portal. “

The FIOL solution is connected to the municipal’s AD FS 2.0 (Active Directory Federation Services) on the internal network and makes it possible to distinguish between AD and NemID users. This layer of security prevents AD users from moving directly on to another system without first logging on with their NemID credentials.

“But it does not help to be innovative if we do not have control over operations. And we have. Our Service Center has received good ratings in benchmark analyses done by Gartner – which is also one of the reasons why we dare to be innovative and proactive. The portal currently has an average of around 7,000 AD users and 10,000 NemID users a day”, says Lars Holbech Sørensen from the Service Center.

”The cooperation between Odense Municipality and Globeteam has been outstanding. In just 6 weeks we had an innovative and future-proof IT solution that makes it possible for employees of the municipality to log on to our employee portal using NemID”.

Allan Schiellerup Bager, Digitalization Manager in Odense Municipality

Future-proof solution

With FIOL, Odense Municipality today has a simple and future proof solution for identity and organization management. “We have developed a solution that can easily be customized further, thus ensuring that we do not have to struggle with 17 different user management solutions. We meet customer, business and management needs, while keeping the technical costs at a minimum,” stresses Digitization Manager Allan Schiellerup Bager.

“The costs for implementing new applications are lowered substantially since there is no longer a need to build new infrastructure or new know-how on each project – and the requirements for providers of applications to be included in the Federation are clear and simple. The integrated solution provides a lot of information that would normally need to be retrieved from multiple sources, making it easy and affordable for application vendors to deploy. FIOL’s compliance with the common public standards also means that we have strong arguments in regards to the requirements that we set to the suppliers,” says Peter Hauge Jensen.

Proactive and innovative staff

The staff of the Economic and Organizational Development department, to which both the Digitalization and Service Centre employees belong, are committed to the department’s mission and vision to support, develop and change Odense Municipality as one organization:

“We will be one step ahead! We will be a professional and business-oriented organization, where results are created and that partners perceive as innovative and dialogue-oriented, “says Allan Schiellerup Bager and refers to the management team for Economics and Organizational Development and their newly articulated vision. The Economics and Organizational Development Department is an interdisciplinary unit consisting of the units Tender, Organization, Economics, Finance, Digitization and Service Center.

“With the FIOL login solution, the Digitization and Service Centre units have in collaboration with Globeteam developed an operational solution and made it strategically important to the entire organization. The new IT solution can also benefit other municipalities and has therefore been one of the themes on a well-attended conference in Odense in June on standards, just as we in the various cooperation forums that we participate in, will talk about the solution, “says Allan Schiellerup Bager.

Peter Langvad
Peter Langvad
Sales Manager

Can I help?

Do you want to hear more about, how Globeteam can help you with a similar solution, please contact me at +45 3086 4343 or pl@globeteam.com