Adaxes for Education
Educational Active Directory and Entra ID environments present unique challenges that can quickly overwhelm an uninitiated administrator. Not only do you need to manage the accounts of teachers and other staff, but also the student accounts. And students are not employees. They are customers. Once you embrace this mindset, all challenges become evident.
Every year, students come and go in droves, and every account must be perfect – with the correct personal details, access to all the learning systems, a mailbox, a Microsoft 365 license, etc. Cutting corners and fixing things on the go can quickly snowball out of control, leading to delays, disgruntled students, or, perish the thought, security breaches.
But it's not all doom and gloom. Adaxes can tackle most, if not all of these challenges with minimal effort.
Automated student onboarding
As we mentioned, onboarding a student is more than creating an AD or Entra ID account. They need a mailbox, a Microsoft 365 license, and so on. With a high volume of new students enrolling every year, you simply cannot afford to do every onboarding step manually.
No doubt, you have the information about future students stored somewhere. Hopefully, in a student management system, or, at the very least, a file. You can feed this data to Adaxes and provision every account automatically right before the academic year starts. Adaxes offers plenty of APIs that you can take advantage of to integrate it with almost any third-party software.
The onboarding procedure may vary depending on the new student's course, faculty, or other parameters. As long as you can rigidly describe the onboarding logic, Adaxes can handle it.
For instance, a workflow might include creating an account, adding it to certain security groups, configuring an Exchange mailbox, assigning Microsoft 365 licenses, executing a custom PowerShell script, sending a welcome email, and notifying the teachers about a new student on their course.
On top of that, the Web interface lets you cover the cases where you don't have enough information about a student to automatically onboard them in advance. We are talking about students that walk up to the registration desk the day before their classes start, absolutely unprepared.
With Adaxes, a registrar will only need to fill out a user-friendly web form with the student details to kick-start the same onboarding workflow. This allows the student to immediately get everything they need to attend class, without delays and without involving the IT department.
More about automated user provisioning
Automated offboarding
Students don't stay forever. We wish you could just delete their account the day after they graduate, but proper offboarding is supposed to be a smooth and beneficial process for all involved parties.
In an ideal world, there should be a grace period where students will gradually lose access to certain systems over time. In reality, it is easier said than done. The more gradual and smooth you try to make offboarding for the students, the more workload is placed on the shoulders of the IT team.
But with Adaxes, you can design, automate, and schedule bulk offboarding workflows of any complexity.
Adaxes will trigger each step precisely when it is supposed to happen and will never make a mistake. Each student will be totally aware of the cutoff dates and will have plenty of time to finalize their education journey.
If you feel that fully automating such a workflow spells disaster, you can add approval steps to it. Every offboarding operation that requires approval will be suspended until approval is granted by a responsible member of the IT department.
More about approval-based workflows
Self-service portal
Students are, no doubt, very capable with technology. But, under no circumstances you would grant them direct access to your directory and let them manage their accounts using native tools. We hope we don't need to explain why.
A more elegant solution would be to use a proxy layer – a self-service Web interface that will allow students to perform basic tasks while not exposing your AD and Entra ID in any way. Everything you cannot automate you might as well delegate.
Students will confidently jump at the opportunity to take charge of their account and handle tasks like updating personal details, booking meeting rooms and equipment, resetting their passwords, requesting membership in groups, or even executing custom workflows you configured for them.
Help desk portal
Adaxes Web interface can also be used as a portal for your help desk. It is fully customizable, so there are plenty of tools to equip them with. After all, they deserve more than a logistical puzzle every academic year.
One indispensable tool that comes to mind is reports. An abundance of reports that enable your help desk to get a firm grip on every account. From tracking students' enrollment status for password self-service to monitoring mailbox usage and overseeing student self-service activity – every conceivable metric is at your fingertips.
Vigilance plays a pivotal role in security, but your help desk can be more than silent observers. The Web interface lets them perform any Active Directory, Entra ID, and Exchange operation without learning and toggling between different admin portals. For example, they will be able to unlock a student's account, extend their mailbox storage quota, and assign a new Microsoft 365 license, all from the same page.
Both, rookies and seasoned pros will be able to accomplish whatever tasks you throw at them. A safety measure in the form of approval-based workflows is always at your disposal, just in case extra control is needed for sensitive operations.
More about help desk management
Role-based access control
So far, we've talked about a Web interface for students and the help desk. The teachers and admins will benefit from their own Web interfaces as well. All these are absolutely different roles and all require different access levels. So how does Adaxes handle this?
Adaxes employs a role-based access model, which literally does what is in the name. It enables you to allocate permissions using security roles perfectly tailored for your typical user roles.
For example, a security role for students might include the permissions to update contact details and reset passwords. That's it. Then, you simply define who gets the role and where the permissions apply. Allowing all students to change their home address means adding one permission entry in one place.
The same goes for every other user type in your environment. Security roles allow you to group granular permissions into clearly defined access levels. A role for the help desk, another for admins, and another for teachers. You get the least privilege principle in all its beauty, full transparency of the access levels, and the ability to modify them on the fly if such a need arises.
More about role-based access control
Case studies
If you work in education and find yourself looking for a tool that will make your life easier, Adaxes will be your Swiss army knife. From automating student account management to safely delegating administrative tasks – all challenges of educational AD environments have a solution. And the best part is that you don't have to dig deep to find it.
See how Adaxes helps educational institutions in the real world:
