Data used only by code

Hi all.
I'm basically a server guy, so most of my time is spent on the infrastructure side.  I have some basic understanding of programming, but it's not something I do a lot.  However, my current position requires me to wear many hats.  I work for a post-secondary educational institution and we have subscriptions to both the VMWare Academic Partner (VMAP) site and Microsoft's Dreamspark, both of which use Kivuto web stores.  My predecessor created a site in c# that is used to access validate users and redirect them to the web stores, along with their role.  He did this by creating a list of Active Directory groups for each role and putting them into a text file one per line, and then using a stream reader (I think that's what it's called) to read in the text file and compare the groups in it with the AD groups the user is in.  He's long gone, and his code has only ever put anyone in Student roles.  So I've been tasked with fixing i ...