As education leaders, you face challenges and opportunities, such as ensuring that every student has the support to graduate successfully, balancing budgets, and driving transformation. While on this journey, one of the most important requirements for all leaders is to ensure that learning is truly accessible and equitable for all students.
Microsoft Intune for Education has been an extremely useful tool for the education industry interested in setting up a virtual classroom, streamlining classes, boosting outcomes, and keeping their data secure. However, ever since the pandemic and the following increase in remote schooling practices, Intune for Education has become even more beneficial.
What is Microsoft Intune for Education?
It is a cloud-based mobile device management service that manages the mobile devices used by your school’s teachers and students and helps schools to keep data secure. The Intune for Education portal provides a central place to manage devices, users, and apps. Using Intune for the education portal, schools can view and take action on the device, user, and app inventory. The Take a Test app also directly supports student progress assessment from classroom devices.
Microsoft built Intune on its existing enterprise cloud management solution with a motive to simplify and address the needs of the education sector. Intune has been operating in the enterprise space since 2011 and supports cross-platform management, in addition to Windows-optimized support in Intune for Education.
Using Microsoft Intune for Education, schools can,
- Manage remote devices like mobiles, laptops, desktops, and tablets used by students for accessing classroom data.
- It allows school management to configure and assign educational or other apps frequently used by students in the classes.
- Easily control the way teachers and students access and share classroom information within and outside the school.
- Apply and integrate security measures necessary to protect data, devices, and apps.
The role of Intune for Education
It makes it easy for educational organizations to provide a safe learning environment, deploy apps, manage users, and secure data while ensuring privacy and compliance across all devices.
Intune for Education offers a simplified management and deployment process, saving time for IT professionals in the education industry. It frees them up to focus on enhancing and supporting students’ learning experience.
Microsoft Intune for Education is streamlined to meet the specific needs of educational institutions. It doesn’t include several features available in the full Intune console, which are geared towards enterprises. Despite missing these features, Intune for Education is not limiting as schools, colleges, and universities don’t require them.
Using the full Intune console requires a lot of configuration during setup, so it can take some time and resources to activate and configure it. Intune for Education reduces complexity and simplifies the dashboard and options, so it doesn’t require an IT professional to configure. It is especially helpful because teachers, professors, and other users often configure Intune within educational organizations and aren’t always IT professionals.
Top Features of Microsoft Intune for Education
Device deployment can be challenging for schools of all sizes, as it is during deployment that group policies are set, data is secured, devices are readied, and essential applications are enabled. However, this task has taken a lot of time to complete. Schools looking to upgrade or replace their devices are faced with two challenges: finding the right device and quickly deploying those devices across hundreds of students and staff.
Here are the top three features offered,
Device Management
IT administrators can use Intune to control user access, manage devices, and deploy device updates remotely. It allows the administrators to keep track of assets, maintain an inventory of all school devices and evaluate the current status of a specific device. There are about 146 settings in Intune for Education. Besides those settings, admins have the liberty to run PowerShell, a task automation and configuration management framework, to get almost limitless flexibility for customizing the solution.
Application Management
Microsoft Intune for Education lets you pre-install certain apps and block other apps, so students can access only the apps that are appropriate for their grade level and class needs. One of the best things about Intune is its flexibility in ensuring compliance with the managed applications. With Microsoft Intune, IT administrators can use app restrictions such as ‘Copy and Paste’ to protect user privacy and school information. Additionally, it becomes easier to manage complex apps like Adobe Photoshop and Video applications using Intune.
Identity Management
Intune for Education comes with specialized functions for managing user identities at schools. The prebuilt Microsoft’s School Data Sync (SDS) in Intune allows school administrators to access student, teacher, school, and class information to customize their experiences. Users can deploy SDS using GASDS or manually generate CSV files to use it with SDS for importing data into Office 365 for Education. Otherwise, perform direct integration with the PowerSchool API and Clever Sync to directly access the information system. It allows compliance and security of personal data.
Microsoft Azure Active Directory (AAD), Microsoft’s cloud directory and identity management service, stores information about users in Intune for Education. It also manages all that information on the backend, protecting student data and enabling single sign-on so students can access their saved information quickly. Microsoft Azure Active Directory, which operates out of 28 global data centers worldwide, backs up school data and makes it instantly accessible. AAD helps users to comply with regulations that require student data to be stored in a particular country.
Overview of Compliance feature available in Microsoft Intune
Microsoft Intune for Education allows you to create a compliance policy by defining rules and settings that users and devices must meet. In addition, you can specify actions that should apply to non-compliant devices. For example, you can set up an action that notifies a user that their device is non-compliant while protecting the data on the non-compliant device.
Microsoft Intune offers the flexibility to use compliance policies to block non-compliant users and devices from accessing educational or classroom resources.
Microsoft Intune currently offers two options in setting the compliance policy. First, compliance policy settings, and second, device compliance policy.
Compliance Policy Setting
You can use compliance policy settings to establish a baseline for how compliance policies will function in your Intune environment.
For example, you might configure a setting that automatically sets the compliance status of a device to noncompliance until it receives its first policy. Some schools may not allow students to use devices that have not been pre-approved by a compliance policy, while other schools may allow them.
Device Compliance Policy
It’s a set of platform-specific rules defined and deployed by the admin to the device users, devices, or apps. For example, you might use a device compliance policy to enforce minimum device requirements.
To ensure compliance, admins might want to ensure devices have a minimum operating system. Admins might also want to ensure all devices use disk encryption. If the device doesn’t meet these requirements, the device is considered non-compliant.
When a device checks in with Intune, it’s evaluated for compliance with the specified policies. If the device is non-compliant, the status is updated on the policy. If the device becomes compliant, the status is updated on the policy. A previously compliant device can also be deemed non-compliant if something changes since the last check-in.
If a device fails to check-in for its policy, Intune will try three more times. But, if the device happens to be offline for any reason, it won’t receive the notifications. The offline device gets the policy at its next scheduled check-in with the Intune service when this happens.
Types of Licenses available In Microsoft Intune
Microsoft Intune for Education is available with the following licenses
- Microsoft 365 Education A5
- Microsoft 365 Education A3
Microsoft 365 Education A3 and A5 License Details for Teacher, Faculty, and Staff
| Microsoft 365 Education A3 $3.25 User/month (Annual Commitment) | Microsoft 365 Education A5 $8.00 user/month (Annual Commitment) |
| All the features in A1 plus full access to the Office desktop apps, and additional management and security tools. | All the features in A3 plus Microsoft’s best-in-class intelligent security management, advanced compliance, and analytics systems. |
| Office Apps: OutlookWord Excel PowerPoint OneNote Publisher (PC Only)Access (PC only) | Office Apps: OutlookWord Excel PowerPoint OneNote Publisher (PC Only)Access (PC only) |
| Services: Exchange OneDrive SharePointTeamsSwayForms Stream Power Automate Power AppsSchool Data Sync Bookings Visio Yammer | Services: Exchange OneDrive SharePointTeamsSwayForms Stream Power Automate Power AppsSchool Data Sync Bookings Power BIVisio Yammer |
| Additional Features: Outlook for the web and a 50 GB mailbox.Unlimited personal cloud storage.Support compliance with solutions from the unified eDiscovery center.Stay protected with rights management, data loss prevention, and encryption.Install the Office desktop apps on up to five PCs or Macs per user. Install Office apps on up to five tablets and five phones per user.Assess risk and gain insight into potential threats with Office 365 Cloud App Security.Gain insight into advanced personal analytics with Microsoft Viva Insights. | Additional Features: Customer Lockbox to control how support accesses your mailbox. An email with a 100 GB mailbox. Protect against sophisticated threats like phishing and zero-day malware with the ability to investigate and remediate attacks post-breach.Advanced personal and organizational analytics with Microsoft Viva Insights personal analytics and Power BI Pro.Enhanced visibility and control of your Office 365 environment.Create meetings with a dial-in number that attendees can join by telephone with Audio Conferencing.Make, receive, and transfer calls across a wide range of devices with an option to add Calling Plan. |
| Reference- https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/academic/compare-office-365-education-plans?activetab=tab:primaryr2 |
Microsoft 365 Education A3 and A5 License Details for Students
| Microsoft 365 Education A3 $2.50 User/month (Annual Commitment) | Microsoft 365 Education A5 $6.00 user/month (Annual Commitment) |
| All the features in A1 plus full access to the Office desktop apps, and additional management and security tools. | All the features in A3 plus Microsoft’s best-in-class intelligent security management, advanced compliance, and analytics systems. |
| Office Apps: OutlookWord Excel PowerPoint OneNote Publisher (PC Only)Access (PC only) | Office Apps: OutlookWord Excel PowerPoint OneNote Publisher (PC Only)Access (PC only) |
| Services: Exchange OneDrive SharePointTeamsSwayForms Stream Power Automate Power AppsSchool Data Sync Bookings Visio Yammer | Services: Exchange OneDrive SharePointTeamsSwayForms Stream Power Automate Power AppsSchool Data Sync Bookings Power BIVisio Yammer |
| Additional Features: Install the Office desktop apps on up to five PCs or Macs per user. Install Office apps on up to five tablets and five phones per user. | Additional Features: All the features provided under the A3 license are available in this license. |
| Reference- https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/academic/compare-office-365-education-plans?activetab=tab:primaryr2 |
EPC Group as Consulting Partner to Implement Microsoft Intune for Education
Suppose you’re looking to optimize your budget, purchase Microsoft Intune at the time of device purchase or opt for a per-user plan. In that case, It provides the much-needed flexibility to manage your devices. As with any software purchase, you’ll want to work with a trusted Intune consulting partner who can find and purchase the software on your behalf and implement it for you. EPC Group will stand by you as a trusted Microsoft Intune consulting partner to help you identify the best offer for your educational institution.
