With the August 3rd, 2015 release of Aeries.net, districts can now integrate their Teacher and Office Staff logins to Aeries.net with Google User Authentication.
This means that districts already using Google Apps for Education (GAFE) can eliminate the need for a different username and password for Aeries.net, effectively further simplifying the use of Aeries.net. And even with Google Authentication turned on, districts administrators can still create native Aeries.net accounts that authenticate to an internal password. So it's not an all-or-nothing situation. Districts can even mix and match the 3 different types of Authentication Aeries.net supports—Internal, Google, and LDAP (Active Directory)—providing maximum flexibility and security.
For many months, Aeries has integrated with GAFE to allow for automatic creation and management of student accounts in Google from Aeries. Google Authentication solidifies the commitment by Eagle Software to integrate Aeries with industry leaders like Google. Next up will be full integration with Google Classroom now that Google has released a public API for Classroom.
Google Authentication does come with some warnings. Google Accounts are "omnipresent" on a workstation and within a browser. This means that when an Aeries.net account is linked to a Google Account and when a workstation/browser is logged into Google, no additional layer of authentication is required to access Aeries.net. Although this may provide additional ease-of-use for many end-users, this does present a certain security risk if the workstation is not secured and protected properly from unauthorized users while logged in as a teacher or office staff member. Eagle Software recommends either reminding users to lock their computers when not in use or screen saver passwords and short screen saver activation times be implemented if Google Authentication is enabled.
For details and screen shots on how to set up Google Authentication in Aeries.net, see the full documentation:
http://www.aeries.com/Downloads/Docs.1234/AeriesNet/Google_Authentication.pdf