Microsoft School Data Sync

[Bob_the_Goon]

Hello,

 

Can anybody tell me what the benefit of setting up School Data Sync is if you already have a way of creating/populating O365 Groups directly from your MIS? I may be missing something here but is School Data Sync not just another way of doing this? Does School Data Sync do something additional to this that we really require.

 

We didn't go down the route of setting up MS Classroom as it was only a beta and I was waiting for it to become generally available. I'm waiting for MS to announce MS Teams for Edu i.e. the version that they showed at their Edu webinar earlier this month and not the current standard version of Teams.

 

Any clarification on SDS would be greatly appreciated!

[rpwillis]

In addition to creating the users and groups, School Data Sync also populates extended attributes in Azure AD with education specific information from the csvs. This allows other applications and 3rd parties access to education specific information using the standard graph api (https://msdn.microsoft.com/office/office365/api/school-rest-operations).

 

There's some 3rd party applications which already use it listed at https://sds.microsoft.com/. About halfway down under "Enrich education apps with single sign-on and secure access to roster data".

 

Intune for Education works off the data populated by it, as will Teams for Education when it is released.

 

At the moment, it is most useful for creating the groups, but as more applications take advantage of the information then it becomes more compelling.

[Bob_the_Goon]

Thank you @rpwillis. This is much clearer now.

 

The csv's don't look too bad however one thing that I noticed was the username field for the students. It will be a bit of a nightmare having to match 1600 pupils up to their O365 username. We use RMUnify at the moment where we populate the via the ADSync utility. I know that I could turn on the MIS matching function of this tool to help alleviate the problem however RMUnify doesn't talk directly to SDS or the Schools REST API as far as I'm aware, so all we would get is the 365 groups (which is a start I suppose).

 

Hmm...not sure whether just to wait for RMUnify to add this functionality in and to switch on the MIS matching to give us the O365 groups whilst we wait...

[Bob_the_Goon]

Actually, thinking about it now, the csv's won't be as bad as I first thought as I could export the usernames out of AD using PowerShell. A bit of a faff though. It would be so much easier RMUnify spoke directly to the Schools REST API.

[zag]

The CSV's are pretty easy to understand and you can look through them to work out whats going on.

 

I've finally got SDS working with both Salamander and Ruler connect using email addresses that we add to the student record in Sims. Just a warning that Salamandersoft currently requires the work email to be populated, not the home email.

 

Oh and don't use the older versions of the free ruler connect as found on their support link, use the latest .3 version. Otherwise it will create 500 classes from last year with no bulk way to delete