Azure AD Premium: Padua College’s perspective

Simplifying the User Experience

Short Description

Since 1956 the school has grown significantly, now encompassing multiple campuses with approximately 1,400 students enrolled. The College knew that it would have to overcome the hurdle of managing the requirements for a hybrid model deployment of Office 365, to allow for co-existence with legacy systems. The College turned to Insync Technology to provide expertise around the Microsoft productivity platform in Office 365 and Azure Active Directory Premium.

Main Features

Azure AD Premium
Office 365
Self-Service Password reset
Single Sign on

01. About Padua College

Padua College, located in the Brisbane suburb of Kedron, prides itself on being a place of affirmation, acceptance, and hospitality. Padua College strives to maximize each individual’s attainment of excellence, while fostering his responsibility to the community as well as the wider global community.

The teaching and learning experience at Padua College is designed using a whole of school approach, while taking into consideration age appropriate learning needs. Information Technology is used within the curriculum framework to support and extend student learning and teacher effectiveness.

“Insync Technology has helped us simplify our user experience and improve satisfaction.”

Peter Yeates, ICT Systems Manager

02.

03. The Challenge

The College recognizes that technology is an integral part of everyone’s daily lives and is now an integral part of educating students for future challenges. As such, the College uses technology widely and extensively throughout the delivered curriculum. This could be typical educational on-premises applications for learning, but frequently the College is turning to Software as a Service (SaaS) providers to deliver new application experiences to students and teachers alike.

With so many users, however, the need for features like self-service password reset and Single Sign On for all applications became paramount to enable effective and efficient use of technology. These features reduce the friction of user login, identification and password management allowing students and teachers to learn without being interrupted.

The College ICT department quickly recognised their need for external expertise to implement these features within the College environment to maximize the productivity of students and teachers and reduce the amount of time that the department was involved in password management tasks.

Key Outcomes

Insync Technology was able to provide a detailed and supportive plan for the migration to Azure AD Premium platform, including the much-needed Self-Service Password Reset, and Single Sign On into defined applications. Insync was engaged to efficiently implement a single Identity solution, while working closely with the College ICT department.

The solutions implemented by Insync Technology were able to simplify the user experience and improve satisfaction, leading to a frictionless login and password management experience for all users. The College can now add additional applications to its Azure AD Premium platform with a minimum of overhead and allowing seamless sign in to these applications.

The College knew that it would have to overcome the hurdle of managing the requirements for a hybrid model deployment of Office 365, to allow for co-existence with legacy systems.

The solution would have to be easily accessible and intuitive, with minimal end-user interaction with the ICT department. The department wanted to ensure a seamless user experience for end users, whether it was logging into on-premises applications or cloud based SaaS apps, or resetting user passwords.

With technology such an integral part of both the running of the school, as well as the Teaching and Learning, the solution needed to be efficient and minimally disruptive.

The College turned to Insync Technology to provide expertise around the Microsoft productivity platform in Office 365 and Azure Active Directory Premium in order to achieve the desired goals of a frictionless ICT experience.

04.

Insync designed and deployed the solution, whilst also providing skills transfer to College ICT staff, thereby empowering them to manage systems on an ongoing basis.

05. The Future

Padua College prides itself on being a forward-thinking school that embraces technology. With a stable identity and authentication platform moving forward, the College will turn its attention to Unified Communications, recognising the need to replace ageing legacy on premises analogue PBX systems.

The project will allow for the deployment of Skype for Business solutions that include the potential of video conferencing and Cloud PBX/PSTN Calling.

In addition, the school plans to further integrate Office 365 and Azure AD to further simplify and enhance ICT processes.

These solutions should not only save the school money but further increase its technological prowess.

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