In a large and ever-changing environment, managing the Microsoft Teams estate in a university is one of the most change-intensive setups there is.
With new cohorts of students guaranteed at least once a year en masse plus mid-term changes in both teaching personnel and students, the number of moves, adds, and changes you go through in a university is second to none.
If you look after multiple faculties, campuses, or perhaps even multiple colleges, you’ve got even more on your plate. It’s truly a balancing act – or more like juggling to be honest.
Let’s put things into perspective
The average number of undergraduates joining a university in the UK was 1,734,805 in 2021. Those are the numbers provided by 281 higher education providers.
Some basic math tells us that that’s an average of 6,177 new students per year. If you’re in the US, that figure plummets to a meagre 2,905 new students per year. (There are simply more universities in the US than the UK.)
I jest. 2,905 new Teams users to provision every September is a considerable burden.
It’s not just the time spent adding names, email addresses, and policies to a user account either. There’s the time pressure of getting everyone provisioned ready for their first day. And all this is going on alongside disabling graduate licences and for others changing them to postgraduate study. While supporting all the university staff too. It all leads to human error.
It’s not like the old days where a student needed a laptop and access to the college intranet. You must assign policies, decide what level of calling they need, and select the channels and access they have.
You must do this 2,905 times.
The cost of manually provisioning 2,905 Microsoft Teams users
In all likelihood, you’re not doing this alone. That many new users in one go would drive anybody crazy. More pertinently, it would drive you to making considerable errors throughout the process.
✅ Note: I portion no blame on you here. When I was provisioning a coordinator, I made lots of mistakes.
Here is the part of this blog post where I’m expected to tell you about the costliness of manual error. We calculated that a “semi-automated” provisioning ticket (one where the IT department uses scripts and some kind of automation alongside human input) costs $32.56.
| Cost of a new user addition / change | ||||
| Item | Resource | Number | Hours | Cost |
| HR system input | Office Worker | 1.00 | 0.50 | $7.66 |
| Service desk ticket logged | Office Worker | 1.00 | 0.10 | $1.53 |
| Ticket triaged & assigned | 1st Line Engineer | 1.00 | 0.10 | $1.48 |
| Ticket actioned by engineer | 2nd Line Engineer | 1.00 | 0.75 | $14.47 |
| Ticket management | 1st Line Engineer | 1.00 | 0.50 | $7.42 |
| Ticket Cost | $32.56 | |||
That’s alarming enough when you multiply it by your number of users:
- $32.56 x 2,905 = $92,412.50
- $32.56 * 6,177 = $201,123.12
But what’s the most hair-raising is what happens when one of those provisioning tasks goes wrong. The cost of the ticket can then jump to $78.83. That’s more than double our original calculation for a semi-automated provisioning job.
We’re also more prone to making another error straight after we’ve made the first one.
Too many cooks spoil the broth
We must go back to the point I raised about you not doing this alone. The last time I provisioned a new VoIP rollout with thousands of users, I got my colleagues to help. I had no choice. We had to be live by a specific time. It wasn’t in this case, but it could have easily been, the first day of the new term when all new students were expected to log in to Teams for whatever reason.
Failure here, of course, sets a terrible first impression for students who’ve paid $10,000s to begin their further education path.
But that addition of new (and different to you) people provisioning new users adds another potential flaw in the equation. You might be confident in your process and your ability, but what if they deviate? What if they decide they’ve found a shortcut and proceed to provision hundreds of users that way?
The only time you find out is when you test a user’s login. By then, your “help” has configured 50 users which you must now duplicate the effort to remedy the problem.
By now, we’ve created a morbid scene that’s costing your department considerable time, effort, and expense. Unfortunately, that’s the nature of manual provisioning.
🚆 Spoiler alert: There is a shining beacon of light at the end of this tunnel. But, first, we must also factor in the bigger picture.
University-specific challenges enter the equation
Before this story gets better, it gets a little worse. It’s like the plot of a really good film where you think you know what’s about to happen and the hero saves the day. Only they don’t quite yet.
(The hero’s name in this case is Orto and we’ll learn about them soon.)
However, we must address the final twist.
If you’re managing a Teams estate for a university (or group of universities), we’re yet to mention the unique challenges you face every day:
- Guest Access & Security: Many universities collaborate with external parties, like guest lecturers or visiting scholars. Ensuring secure guest access while maintaining internal security is a delicate balance.
- FERPA and GDPR Compliance: Universities must comply with strict data privacy regulations like FERPA in the U.S. and GDPR in Europe. Ensuring Teams is configured in compliance with these regulations, especially regarding the storage and sharing of student data, is crucial.
- Data Retention Policies: Universities must establish specific data retention policies to ensure that records are kept for regulatory compliance. They must also avoid storing unnecessary data for too long.
- Multi-factor Authentication (MFA): Implementing MFA for large numbers of users, especially students who may not be familiar with the process, can lead to logistical challenges.
- Learning Management Systems Integration: Integrating Teams with these systems like Blackboard, Moodle, and Canvas can be challenging, especially if the platforms don’t natively support seamless communication.
- Network Traffic Management: With thousands of students and staff using Teams for meetings, file sharing, and collaboration, there can be significant network strain, especially during peak usage periods such as exam times or online lectures.
- Supporting Marketing With Student Recruitment Activities: Such as telemarketing campaigns and open-day events where IT is paramount to guest experience.
And, by the way, we haven’t even touched on what happens to user accounts when they leave. Let’s park that story for another time.
The point of raising these issues is twofold:
- Universities are unique in that you’re dealing with a large number of users who are new to Teams once a year.
- There are significant (and often higher priority) challenges that fall under your remit throughout the year.
My overarching point is: You need help.
How Orto makes provisioning new students error-free
Orto is so-called because Orto-matic. Get it? We’re talking about automated provisioning for Microsoft Teams.
Instead of the manual, click-by-click, script-by-script, painful process, you can create user persona templates. Once you have your set of templates, a new starter joins your business, and you select which they slot into.
When creating your new user’s Microsoft accounts using Entra (formerly Azure AD), all you need to do is select their user persona based on department, geography, or seniority.
Once selected, Orto does the configuration for you. You configure the Azure AD attribute and out comes a fully configured Teams account with the relevant permissions and policies needed for that specific persona.
Here are the policies we can automate assignment of, straight out of the box:
- App Setup
- Audio Conferencing
- Call Hold
- Calling
- Call Park
- Channels
- Compliance Recording
- Emergency Calling
- Emergency Call Routing
- Enhanced Encryption
- Events
- Files
- IP Phone
- Meeting Broadcast
- Meeting
- Messaging
- Mobility
- Room Video Tele Conferencing
- Shifts
- Survivable Branch Appliance
- Video Interop Service
- Voice Applications
- WorkLoad
- Meeting Branding
- Dial Plan
If you’re a Teams admin, here’s how your life could look:
To be clear, we’re not suggesting you remove humans from the process entirely. You, the Teams admin, still need to create the persona templates first.
This requires a deep dive into what each job role requires. But once you have these, the ROI of Microsoft Teams auto-provisioning is clear.
You’ll save time, effort, and the cost of manual errors. Streamlining your Microsoft Teams account setup really should be a no-brainer.
You’ll have more time to better support staff, students, and other university campaigns, meaning reduced escalation times, and improvements to those all-important NSS scores. These will all be seen as favourable in the eyes of the Faculty Deans, Heads of School, and Marketing too. Bonus!
Not only that, but streamlining your user moves, adds, changes, and deletes will also give you time back to focus on other important projects.
How to get started with Orto for Teams
Sounds like something you want to get your teeth stuck into? I don’t blame you.
As a former provisioner, and someone who works with companies that have thousands of users, working with this new technology has somewhat filled me with jealousy. I wish I had access to it when my entire day was playing with BroadSoft and Skype for Business licenses.
If you’d like to start streamlining your Microsoft Teams account setup, book a demo with one of our Teams experts.
