Skhumbuzo Mjoji, the Chief Technology Officer at InfoVerge.
The Free State Department of Education has partnered with InfoVerge to deploy, optimize and support the Microsoft 365 environment, which helps modernize systems for administrators and schools in the province.
Randall Pienaar, acting director of IT and Information Services at the Free State Ministry of Education, explains that InfoVerge is helping the department overcome limitations specific to state education departments and optimize the value of its Microsoft 365 investments.
Pienaar says: “In our first contract period, InfoVerge was a subcontractor. They helped the department overcome the challenge of migrating workloads to the required hybrid configuration, overcome connectivity issues by using OneDrive storage for backup, and optimize Teams for use as the primary collaboration and communications platform.”
The department recently entered into a second three-year contract with InfoVerge as a Microsoft software implementation partner, supporting its journey to digital education.
To overcome the time-consuming task of setting up thousands of devices for students, InfoVerge deployed Microsoft Intune – a cloud-based endpoint management solution – for remote deployment and simplified management.
Pienaar says: “In the past, it was a tedious job for our teams to set up the laptops and format them individually. With the software we have now, we create online accounts and profiles for students, and these are pushed to them as soon as the user logs into their account, making the environment much more efficient.
“Huge improvements have been made at the communication level: we have bundled the use of Teams with mobile contracts and deployed mobile office routers in schools, equipped with SIM cards that are not suitable for Teams. Professional development sessions and meetings on Teams cost schools nothing. Even the phones of district and provincial administrators have a zero value on Teams,” he says.
Forty-four schools are currently part of the department’s virtual learning proof-of-concept initiatives, with 1,900 district and provincial administrators, more than 28,000 teachers and approximately 13,500 students, powered by the Microsoft 365 environment. Security throughout the environment is ensured with Microsoft security software included with the corporate and campus packages the department uses.
Now that the fundamental infrastructure is in place, the department’s modernization process continues. “There is software that we have not yet used effectively – for example Microsoft Projects. One objective of the new three-year contract with InfoVerge is to train at least two units – our infrastructure and IT projects divisions – in the effective use of Microsoft Projects,” says Pienaar.
“We also want to look at modernizing our EMIS (Education Management Information System) portal using Power BI to make student performance data and parent and teacher data more visual. Another project planned is moving our intranet and school database submission systems SA-SAMS (South African School Administration Management System) to SharePoint.”
Skhumbuzo Mjoji, Chief Technology Officer at InfoVerge, says strict rules and guidelines apply to state departments such as education: “It was necessary to have a hybrid solution because some of the tools we wanted to implement relied on the cloud, such as Teams. We had to innovate to bring tools like Teams to add value to the department, within constraints such as network capacity and cloud guidelines.”
Itumeleng Chuene, Chief Revenue Officer at InfoVerge, said InfoVerge’s innovative approaches to addressing customer challenges extend to change management and skills development. “One thing we identified as a challenge was the resources to manage the new Microsoft 365 environment. To address this, we bring in interns and train them on every stream we deliver, and then we promote them and transfer them to the department. This gives our customer continuity and gives our interns more power and skills.”
The Free State Department of Education’s modernization program will be featured in the first of a new series of six InfoVerge webinars titled: “Navigating the Digital Frontier: Pioneering Efficiency and Compliance Across Industries,” featuring customer success stories and lessons learned illuminated. The From classroom to cloud: taking education to the next level with Microsoft Tech webinar, to be held on July 17 this year, explores the power of Microsoft technologies in reshaping the education landscape. This webinar outlines the experiences of the Free State Department of Education and delves into comprehensive strategies for planning, deploying, adopting, deploying, and managing Microsoft environments at scale. For more information and to register for this event, visit https://www.infoverge.co.za/elevating-education-with-microsoft-tech/.
ITWeb
www.itweb.co.za
