IT Help Desk in Office 365 & SharePoint for Higher Education: Better Service to Faculty and Students
The Challenge
Managing IT within higher education can be a huge undertaking. The IT staff is often faced with the daunting task of providing quick and efficient services to tens of thousands of users across multiple colleges, departments, and locations with a hybrid learning environment.
A large Public Research University in Texas was facing this challenge. The IT group was using an outdated system that could not manage the large numbers of tickets coming in from the many employees and students. Help desk technicians were in a constant fighting mode to handle the large volumes of tickets.
The system was sorely overloaded and unable to handle user requests efficiently. The IT Staff began looking for another solution. Since the university had implemented Microsoft 365 and Teams, they wanted to find a solution that could integrate easily with Office 365 & SharePoint for Education.
IT needed an efficient and effective centralized help desk that could support multiple campuses with an end-user base that included 12,000 faculty and staff, and over 55,000 students, from diverse backgrounds with a wide range of needs.
The Solution
After a thorough evaluation of several IT service systems, the university’s IT Team chose Crow Canyon Software’s IT Help Desk. The team was impressed with its ease of use, minimal learning curve, cross-site functionality, and powerful integration tools. The Help Desk is powered by Crow Canyon’s NITRO Studio Business Process Automation platform, which provides tools to create forms, build workflows, manage processes, show reports and dashboards, monitor approvals, and much more.
The Crow Canyon Help Desk, with the NITRO Studio platform under it, gave the IT staff wide flexibility to set up the Help Desk how they needed. It provided easy access to the entire Office 365 User Group, which was a very important requirement for a large institution with so many colleges and departments. These built-in integration capabilities of Crow Canyon Software with Microsoft 365 made the implementation successful.
The IT team easily implemented the new IT Help Desk and soon found they were more organized, work was more streamlined, and the ticket queue was well-managed. With the interactive dashboard and visibility reports, tickets were now prioritized and tracked.
NITRO Studio’s workflows allowed the IT department to easily build processes for multiple teams per department with specific specialties, which placed the ticket coming in from across the campus in the right hands. This targeted approach provided end users with much faster results and a better experience. The NITRO-powered IT Help Desk provided flexibility to change departmental requirements, access various databases, and provide end-users with a dynamic, responsive, and integrated solution.
“NITRO Help Desk and Work Order business applications provided robust functionality and out-of-the- box tools to satisfy our staff and student needs and to support process management with real-time reporting, and engaging dashboards.”
– Technology Services and Support Team, Public Research University in Texas
Expanding to Use Work Order Tracking
Shortly after the success of the IT Help Desk, the IT team added Crow Canyon’s Work Order application. This tool, also powered by NITRO Studio, brought their work order management under control by digitizing tasks and keeping a public record of who was assigned to what, what work was done, when the work was due, who or what the work was for and what resources would be needed, and more, on each task.
“We are using NITRO Studio and the NITRO Business Applications along with M365 as part of our digital transformation strategy. It has allowed us to move away from paper forms by modernizing them with a simple workflow, beautifying them with the NITRO Forms designer, and adding functionality with e-signatures, approvals, and tracking capabilities.”
– Technology Services and Support Team
Using the full NITRO Studio Business Process Automation Platform
While using the NITRO-powered Help Desk and Work Order systems, the staff soon realized they could use the power of NITRO Studio as a complete business process automation platform. They saw that NITRO Studio is affordable, easy-to-use, easy-to-learn, highly flexible, and comes with a deep set of capabilities.
The full NITRO Studio Business Process Automation platform was implemented in the O365 tenant, giving IT staff the ability to build solutions that automate many business processes and replace outdated, legacy systems. Through the use of dynamic, responsive forms and no-code workflows, the team could bring efficient process automation to any department.
This Public Research University in Texas, like many other higher education institutions, is finding it more important than ever to reimagine the campus experience in this fully digital age. Crow Canyon Software, in conjunction with Office 365 & SharePoint for Education, is providing a pathway to drive digital transformation initiatives forward with innovative and efficient solutions that power business processes and transform operations.
And the good news is that both IT staff and the many people they serve are happy with the results!
