Early ISVs building on the new Higher Education Accelerator and the Microsoft Power platform

Contributors: Michael Gernaey and Stan Ray

The Microsoft Higher Education Accelerator is the second Industry Accelerator from Microsoft following the release of the Healthcare Accelerator earlier this summer. Industry Accelerators are foundation components within the Microsoft Power platform and Dynamics 365 that enable ISVs and other solution providers to quickly build industry vertical solutions.

The Higher Education data model, solutions, data samples, Power BI examples, SDK extensions, and more are provided as part of the open source creative license and available on GitHub. The development of the Higher Education model was done in collaboration with leading industry expert solution providers focused on Higher Education and Microsoft is committed to working with the higher education community to provide regular updates to Accelerator.

The Higher Education Accelerator, Microsoft Power platform and Dynamics 365 provide the building blocks for ISVs to build solutions to address the unique needs in Higher Education. In this blog post, I’m delighted to highlight some of the early adopters of the Higher Education Accelerator.

Campus Management

Campus Management will soon be releasing CampusNexus Engage, the next generation platform for higher education constituent relationship management built on Microsoft technology. From admissions to alumni, the Campus Management client community is providing input for the evolution of intelligent, connected institutions. That foundation will include the new open source Microsoft Higher Education Accelerator that was just announced.

“With CampusNexus Engage, data and analytics will drive the easy-to-operate dashboards that make student engagement and administrative tasks more timely, manageable and constituent-focused,” said Mark Armstrong, Campus Management Chief Strategy Officer. “This intelligent engagement platform gives institutions the information they need to change the business of higher education and better predict student needs. The Microsoft Higher Education Accelerator allows our new platform to be more open and easier to integrate with future apps, essentially an innovation palette!”

Watch a new video of Mark talking about how Campus Management is using Dynamics 365, the Power platform, and the new Higher Education Accelerator here.

Nuventive

Nuventive’ s mission is to provide individuals and institutions with the capacity to improve and transform through the better use of information. Nuventive’s unique, fully automated, cloud-based BI solutions can be deployed in a fraction of the time at a fraction of the cost and embedded within your core academic and administrative processes tied to your goals. Our approach makes it easier to achieve transformative results by supporting the effective use of information by users with a wide range of experience with business intelligence solutions.

Leveraging the Microsoft Higher Education Accelerator and the Power platform allows us to streamline and expedite the complex process of consolidating our customers’ pertinent data from multiple disparate sources into a well-defined, central repository and enabling robust, self-service analytics over that central repository to generate the insights that inform and guide their strategic initiatives and broader informational needs. 

Mazik Global

MazikEd Student Success app built on the Microsoft Higher Education Accelerator provides a full Student-360 personalized experience. The Student-360 view consists of a student’s personal demographics that include a student’s timeline and activities. It also contains a history of any applications, academics, admissions, registration, financial aid, student scholarship profile, student holds and risk assessment with all the privacy and confidentiality controls required and appropriate to educational institutions.

Student 360 contains a case management module, which gives administrative staff the ability to open a case of students who are at-risk of failing and assign it to case managers to help the student succeed. The system will be able to generate alerts and flag these students at-risk for intervention and prevention actions by having the proper individuals such as faculty members or advisers respond to help the student. Alerts and flags could be generated when trends of poor attendance or drops in grade point averages are identified.

Also included is a Faculty 360 view which consists of a complete view of an instructor’s personal demographics, courses they are teaching, along with the students enrolled in the classes. It also contains information on the academic progress of the students the Professor is teaching.

 Avtex

Avtex Student Services is built atop the new Microsoft Higher Education Accelerator. Student Services provides a case management and knowledge base solution specifically for Education which enables students to find information or resolve issues independently and efficiently.

Avtex Corporate Engagement is another solution that leverages the new Higher Education Accelerator. Corporate Engagement provides a detailed view into companies, associated contacts, and related materials. From prospective projects, to engaged organizations, this single pane of glass view into the history of the relationship, key players and inflight opportunities provides the right context for institutions to be successful.

Closing

We’re working with other ISVs to bring new solutions to market for Education. If you’re an ISV who’d like to engage with us on the product team to build on these new Industry Accelerators, we’d love to hear from you, please contact us via this quick form.