ScholarBuys is committed exclusively to the academic community, and a primary focus of ours is to promote the adoption of innovative technology from our reputable partners. Today’s case study is with MacMurray College, highlighting the immediate impact that they, and many other academic institutions, are seeing with Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory Premium solution for their identity and access management in the cloud.
MacMurray College is a four-year, career-directed college with a strong liberal arts tradition, committed to preparing graduates for satisfying and productive professional careers, effective leadership, and enriched lives of continuing learning, achievement, and service. The campus is located in west central Illinois in the city of Jacksonville, about 30 miles west of the state capital of Springfield.
At MacMurray it was becoming increasingly difficult to efficiently and effectively manage user names and passwords necessary for their users to access school resources. MacMurray’s Director of Information Technology – Paul Younker – explained that his staff was spending valuable time on password-related help desk requests. They were in search of a secure Single Sign-On solution, that would enable their users to access all college resources using the same username and password both on-premise and in the cloud.
ScholarBuys conducted a comprehensive review with Paul and his team, and helped identify that Azure Active Directory Premium (AADP) P1 would meet all of their requirements and more. MacMurray was already leveraging AD for identity and access management, and extending their on-premises AD into Azure AD was a natural fit. This allows users to utilize their primary school credentials to not only sign in to their domain-joined devices and school resources, but also cloud applications. MacMurray enabled Azure AADP to automatically write passwords back to their on-premises Active Directory, allowing users to reset their own passwords from any device, anywhere.
MacMurray also saw significant value through the Student Use Benefit. In licensing 100% of their Faculty and Staff users with Azure AD Premium they receive 100% Student coverage at no additional cost, allowing them to standardize on one platform.
“The Student Use Benefit has been well received and is a nice “perk” for us to be able to offer. Because of this benefit, we were able to eliminate the annual payment on the third-party SSPR utility that we had in place for our Students.”
MacMurray College has seen an immediate impact. Reducing downtime due to password-related issues, the user experience has greatly improved with AADP- providing faculty, staff, and students with easier access to their on-premise and cloud applications. Help desk requests have significantly dropped, allowing the IT staff to focus their time on other projects.
“SSPR and SSO were the main reasons we chose Azure AD Premium. We have deployed both and are very happy with the results. We have seen a significant reduction in password-related help desk requests since implementing Self Service Password Reset. We had several usability issues with our previous solution.”
ScholarBuys is proud to partner with MacMurray College on their identity and cloud initiatives, and we are excited to hear about their on-going success with these services. There are many features, and a wide range of functionality, built in to Azure Active Directory Premium that are beneficial to Education.
