Integration Suite for School Groups and Trusts

Highlights

Product detail

The problem

As Technology continues to advance and more and more focus is put on digital learning, more and more staff and students are demanding access to solutions such as Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 simply and easily. As a group of schools with a central provision it can be challenging to provide these tools to staff and students quickly and efficiently.

The solution

Our Integration Suite helps schools, trusts, local authorities and other groups of schools manage the provisioning and life cycle of their user accounts, and provide easy and quick ways for teachers and students to gain access to the tools in G Suite for Education and Microsoft 365 when they need it.

User Provisioning

When a new user is added to the MIS, their account is automatically created. If created into an On-premise Active Directory, the user is assigned the appropriate groups, and a home folder created with the relevant permissions and sharing options.

User is Office 365 are licensed based on the sites needs such as different licensing for Staff and Pupils and disabling packs for particular sets of users.

Security and Mail group provisioning

Integral to many environments is the ability to automatically handle the management of groups for use with policies, delegation or simply mail distribution.

Our solution allows the management of groups both within individual schools, or at a group/trust level allowing groups to be kept up to date automatically throughout the year, or as part of a rollover to a new academic year.

These groups can be based on class/subject data as well as the pupil/staff members core data allowing for a great deal of flexibility in the options available.

MS Teams and Google Classrooms

A Growing number of our customers, both large and small are working with us to automatically provision their Google Classrooms and/or Microsoft Teams directly from the data available in their MIS, either to some or all of their schools and classes.

The is helping sites more easily deploy these new features in a controlled and consistent manner whilst ensuring they are kept up to date as teachers and students move classes.

Timetable Synchronisation

A popular feature is the ability to push timetables as Calendars into Microsoft 365 and/or Google Workspace either in their main calendar, or as a sub calendar.
This can be their users’ timetable, or for some MIS systems could be their Cover Timetable or the main school diary.
Events can be categorised, and reminders set if required.

Additional Integrations

We also have support for integrations with Photos in Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace, syncing of data to Apple School Manager, syncing of data to Paxton NET2 and can provide export files in several formats for use in other systems.

MIS/SIS Writeback

For a fee, it is also possible to write back some information into the Schools MIS systems, such as Email address, or username.

Solution Management ‘Portal’

We include a management portal, in the form of a website used to help the Trust/group manage the provisioning solution and the options available within the provisioning.

For larger trusts/groups it would be possible to discuss some bespoke development for this portal to allow a better integration with your environments.

Architecture

Our solutions are built on the Microsoft .NET Stack.
For smaller scale installations our services can run from a single Windows Server machine, running either on-premise or in your own cloud tenancies.
For larger installations (100k users plus) we would probably recommend a solution based on Azure Technologies.

Data security and privacy

We take data security and the privacy of your data very seriously and have built our solutions around keeping the data within your existing environments. We do not store and of your data, or have it pass through any hosted solutions outside of your existing networks and tenancies.

Scalability

Our solutions are designed and tested to work all sizes of organisations, ranging from a single school through to a country level with our largest deployment managing the automated life cycle of over 600,000 users weekly in both Office 365 and G Suite from over 1400 MIS/SIS Instances.

Ongoing support

Support is provided by our dedicated support team and is included as part of the annual license fee. This support includes all configuration changes to the solution as well as on-going maintenance to ensure you get the most out of the solution.

Pricing varies depending on the size of your trust / group, and your integration needs.
Please contact us to for a free quote.

Pricing information