Automating to Save Time: 6 Cool iPaaS Stories
iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service) is a cloud-based platform used to connect a variety of different systems, technologies and applications - whether they are on-premise or in the cloud - and avoid the use of middleware and specialized hardware. Using iPaaS, people can build automated workflows that do a number of tasks, simple or complex, including the syncing of data, onboarding/offboarding or resetting passwords.
Let’s take a look at the specific ways in which iPaaS is helping six of our customers to maximize their resources and save time.
Metropolitan State University
Metropolitan State University is one of seven universities within Minnesota state and one of 37 institutions (state colleges and universities) as a whole. As you can imagine, there is an abundance of data being collected and shared among these different groups, whether it be across different campuses or on the same campus. This structure caused a great need for a common integration platform and workflow engine.
Ben Deneen, Director of Enterprise Information and Application Services at the university, explains, “Every time something runs, I want all that information, I want the error logs, I want that all documented so that we can run as efficiently and effectively.”
The University chose TeamDynamix iPaaS to do just that.
For example, Deneen is using iPaaS to link up systems and manage security access to buildings and classrooms.
Using the information collected through the use of iPaaS, the security team can verify information and requests when it comes to opening buildings and classrooms using RFID technology for door access. When someone swipes their ID at a door, a workflow will bounce back to the security system to validate credentials. If the person is cleared, the door opens, and the security camera is prompted to record activity at the site so there is a record of who is going in and out.
And that’s just one example of how Metropolitan State is using TeamDynamix iPaaS.
“We were using a different iPaaS tool before and it took a lot of time to spin up and it became really expensive for what we were hoping to do with it,” Deneen said. “It was fine for connecting macro systems, but we couldn’t scale it the way we wanted.”
With TeamDynamix iPaaS, Deneen is not having the same issues. In fact, they’ve been able to move quickly with the new iPaaS tool and use it to integrate all their systems from their old ERP to Workday, Active Directory and more.
“We’re able to easily spin up these connections and make it turnkey so anyone can use it,” Deneen said. And with so many campuses across the state of Minnesota, it’s been invaluable to be able to have a common integration platform and workflow engine with governance and tracking
Saint Louis University
At Saint Louis University Cid Cardoz, director of end-user IT services for the university, says the no-code nature of TeamDynamix’s platform is what caught his eye because it meant that anyone could administer it, even if they didn’t have programming knowledge.
One way SLU uses iPaaS is by utilizing a workflow for adding users to Active Directory groups. Without anyone going in and doing manual work, someone can be added to a directory simply by submitting a request. IPaaS automats the approval process and adds the user to the appropriate group. “iPaaS allows us to be more efficient in our workflows and processes,” Tom Birmingham, an ITSM specialist for the university, said.
Grand Valley State University
Grand Valley State University introduced TeamDynamix iPaaS in September of 2021 with the goal of expediting IT service delivery for students. One specific task they were hoping to tackle was automating the process of assigning software licenses to students and faculty.
At the university, SPSS software licenses are offered upon request, and this past semester they had over 600 requests. With iPaaS, the previous process of manually providing a license code to each user is now automated.
The service desk has also been helped through the automation of password expiration notices. Through a flow that pulls a report of upcoming expirations, students will receive an email letting them know when their password is going to expire.
Karen Burchard, an Academic Systems Coordinator at GVSU is excited for what iPaaS can do for the university, saying “We have so many ideas of what we want to automate next with iPaaS, we’re just getting started.”
BYU-Idaho
BYU-Idaho started exploring TeamDynamix iPaaS when they realized they wanted to automate various processes on their campus, specifically onboarding new employees and sending out financial aid notifications.
Using iPaaS, the team at BYU-Idaho created flows to take an employee through the entire onboarding process.
This is incredibly beneficial and saves the university a lot of time since they regularly hire student employees. These students need a lot of access to different tools and programs and giving access/taking it away is now a seamless, quick task.
“We’re doing a lot (with iPaaS) in HR with onboarding flows, and there are a lot of other groups around campus that want to use the onboarding flows to onboard an employee from the beginning, all the way to getting their equipment sent out and getting them into Active Directory,” Nepal Plummer, Director of Product and Service Management, said. “And we haven’t even opened up the floodgates yet.”
As for tracking student financial aid awards, the university used to have to send the award letters through Outlook with no way of tracking them. Now with iPaaS, there are individual tickets for each award letter so that counselors can see the information they need for each individual student.
They also created a flow that allows the IT team to recall and restore deleted data in tickets. Kevin Cook, Application System Engineer, explains the significance of this workflow, saying “We had 2500 tickets that didn’t have a value because that choice was accidentally deleted. So, we were able to use iPaaS to go out and grab a report with those tickets and update them to put that value back on the tickets.”
After other departments saw how helpful iPaaS has been, they are just waiting for their own chance to try it out.
Bowdoin College
For Bowdoin College, client experience is their number one priority. So, automating a number of different tasks in order to give more of their time to their clients was something they knew they needed to do.
Since adopting iPaaS, many of the flows they’ve built have focused on how they get messages to customers, specifically focusing on making sure it doesn’t seem like a robot sent the message.
“iPaaS can send these wonderful, high-quality messages to our internal and external clients where they are,” Jason Pelletier, Senior Director of Client Services and Technology at the college, said. “So, for example, the message can go to them via email or Microsoft Teams if they use Teams.”
Another way Bowdoin College uses iPaaS is to auto-close tickets and initiate a sequence to send a survey. Once a ticket is closed a survey is automatically sent out so that feedback is received quickly and agents are notified of survey results in real-time, allowing for more effective work in the future.
"We’re always thinking about and making sure that we are using iPaaS to enhance the experience for both our technicians, agents and staff, as well as our customers,” Pelletier said.
Palm Beach State
For Palm Beach State creating a holistic view of the hundreds of applications and systems they utilize daily, was an important reason to invest in iPaaS.
“We were looking to find a solution that allows us to get the relevant data needed to our stakeholders, while also presenting a user experience for students that makes sense,” Ken Libutti, CIO, said.
One way they are using iPaaS is to make the process of pulling student and registration information more efficient. Using the Workday connector, iPaaS pulls student data from Workday and places it into a data warehouse. Within the warehouse, one can find dashboards for student enrollment and student access measures.
“We didn’t want to build a bunch of point-to-point integrations, rather we wanted to leverage iPaaS to manage all integrations to one data warehouse,” Libutti said.
Additionally, they’ve built another workflow to handle how continuing education students are added to the database. People who enroll in continuing education classes don’t need to be provisioned in the same way a student at the college needs to be, so Libutti and his team had to come up with a way to make Eventbrite work with their other systems.
“We needed to have the courses loaded into our learning management system, as well as make sure the people registered for these classes populated into RAVE,” he said. “RAVE is our mobile safety application, and we use it for a couple of things like emergency announcements, as well as communication to students in targets groups.”
Using iPaaS, Libutti and his team built a workflow that uses APIs from Eventbrite to pull the registration data for each person and place it into an SQL table. That data in the SQL is then used to provision the continuing education students and add them to RAVE, they are also added to Canvas.
The result is a fantastic user experience for the students registering for these non-credit classes through Eventbrite, and a workflow that automates the access and information needed by the institution on the backend to properly create logins and access needed from Active Directory, as well as getting the information into RAVE for any communication needs.
“We want all the data to come into the data warehouse because we know TeamDynamix iPaaS can keep all those APIs in sync, which keeps the data in sync and it ensures we are doing the transforms that need to be done to the data,” Libutti said. “Having that single source of truth – knowing the data is in sync and valid – is our main focus and why we were so interested in iPaaS.”