How to Prepare for AI and Copilot in Education

How to Start Using Microsoft 365 Copilot

Orchestry offers a comprehensive suite of features designed to help educational institutions better understand, manage, and optimize their environments. In the education sector, we often encounter several common challenges that Orchestry is uniquely equipped to address, including:

• Efficiently manage provisioning to prevent students, faculty, and staff from creating Teams and SharePoint sites haphazardly, ensuring a more organized and streamlined environment.
• Manage storage and version history effectively, helping you avoid massive bills in light of Microsoft's recent changes to EDU storage costs.
• Oversee guest accounts, a significant concern for educational institutions, enabling smooth communication with alumni and other external stakeholders.
• Clean up existing workspaces, ensuring you don't retain unnecessary content indefinitely, maintaining a tidy and efficient digital environment.

Let's explore how Orchestry can help!

Provisioning

Orchestry provides advanced provisioning capabilities that enable schools, universities, and educational institutions to strike the perfect balance between user empowerment and control. Its powerful Workspace Templating features allow you to quickly and easily create comprehensive, repeatable templates. These templates include Teams channels, SharePoint site configurations, Planner tasks, and documents, ensuring a consistent and efficient setup for your educational environments.

Effortlessly create a comprehensive Classroom template that includes all necessary components, enabling institutional users to request it whenever needed, saving valuable time. Standardize projects by having a complete, ready-to-use project template available at all times.

Orchestry can also help standardize:

• Naming Conventions: Users can select from a series of dropdown options to effortlessly construct names. With Orchestry, the days of manually following naming conventions are over—users can simply point and click to ensure consistency and accuracy.
• Proper ownership: Ensure proper ownership of all workspaces with our default owners, minimum owners, and members policies. These policies guarantee that users are creating workspaces with clear purpose and accountability, preventing unnecessary or redundant workspace creation.
• Enforce Security: Don't leave security to your users. With Orchestry, security settings are fully defined within your templates, ensuring that everything provisioned adheres to your organization's security policies.

Content Clean-up & Archiving

Orchestry makes it easy to identify and clean up old Teams and SharePoint sites with just a click of a button. You can swiftly establish policies that prompt workspace owners to make decisions regarding their sites, whether you have one, a thousand, or 100,000 sites to manage.

Educational institutions often create hundreds or even thousands of Teams and SharePoint sites each semester, and these rarely get cleaned up due to busy schedules. With Orchestry’s powerful Lifecycle Management features, you can quickly establish policies to automate this cleanup process. Simply create a policy, select your desired actions—whether it’s renaming a team, changing membership, or archiving content while removing previous versions—and let Orchestry handle the remediation for you.

Then let Orchestry handle the heavy lifting by contacting your workspace owners and allowing them to make the necessary decisions.

Orchestry not only allows you to quickly clean up entire sites but also helps you save up to 90% on storage costs by removing previous versions of content and archiving sites—all without any custom code and at an enterprise scale.

Ongoing Lifecycle Management

Cleaning up is one thing, but what about ongoing management of workspaces? Orchestry can be configured to help you manage your newly created Teams and SharePoint sites using our Archival/Renewal Policies.

Imagine you want to ensure that all your classroom Teams are correctly archived at the end of each school term to enhance security, reduce storage costs, and enforce governance rules. Orchestry enables you to create a specific policy for Classroom sites that can be applied to a template. Upon creation, this policy is automatically applied to any new workspaces, ensuring consistent management and compliance.

Once the term is over, say 180 days after creation, Orchestry can automatically archive the workspaces without needing to contact the owners. This ensures that only relevant and timely content remains active in your environment, enhancing security and compliance throughout your institution.

Guest Management

Working with some of the largest educational institutions, we've learned that they often manage a significant number of guest users—sometimes thousands or even hundreds of thousands. This is unique to the education sector, where alumni and external guests can comprise a substantial portion of the total user population.

Simply enabling Guest User Access Management for all Teams and SharePoint sites in Microsoft 365 can lead to governance, security, and compliance challenges, as anyone can add guests without oversight.

Orchestry addresses this in two key ways. First, instead of allowing random guest additions, you can control the process with a Guest Request policy. This policy can capture additional information, be applied on a per-workspace basis, and ensure that approvals occur before a guest is added. This enhances security and compliance while maintaining necessary access for external collaborators.

The process is simple and seamless for your end users, allowing them to add a guest directly within their own Team's context. Additionally, Orchestry offers Guest Reviews, which help clean up guest accounts or ensure that once guests are added, they undergo a review process by the workspace owners to confirm continued access.

Owners can perform all these actions directly within Teams, as Orchestry integrates with Teams alerts for a smooth and efficient experience.

Conclusion

As you can see, Orchestry extends far beyond the standard M365 capabilities to help you manage your environment more effectively. It ensures correct access, reduces storage costs, and offers a multitude of other benefits. If you're interested in exploring the capabilities of Orchestry, learn more with our trial!