Fulton County Schools (FCS) is the 4th largest school system in Georgia
“We needed our time back. We have a limited number of administrators to handle so many groups and accounts. Once we discovered sapio365, it not only saved us time but it gave us capabilities we could only dream of. We can now focus on other tasks and solution-based projects. I haven't found another tool that is able to do what sapio365 does.”
Jeff Edison, Office 365 Administrator, Enterprise Applications
Fulton County School
Fulton County Schools (FCS) discovered sapio365 when they were searching for Microsoft 365 admin tools that would help them manage an incredibly large environment of users, including staff, teachers and students. When they found sapio365, they realized it would be an incredible asset for their team.
FCS has a limited number of IT administrators to manage excessively large number of groups, user accounts, service accounts, shared email accounts, calendar accounts and more. The size and scope of the environment that they needed to support made it difficult for the team to report on groups and accounts accurately. They had tried using PowerShell and other software solutions but there was a limit to how many objects they would be able to see and manage.
Performing a discovery search with PowerShell, they were only able to see 100 groups. Using sapio365, the FCS team was able to see a detailed breakdown of 15,000 groups that can then be sorted. This information could be exported to Excel and then presented by the team to management to enable better strategic decisions.
Every semester, FCS rolls out Teams for each class and these Teams include both teachers and students. This translates to thousands of Teams that need to be deployed properly at one time. This is a challenge for the team as they must follow policies that dictate when to archive Teams from the previous years and delete Teams within a certain period of time. FCS was also quickly approaching the limits of their Microsoft object quota.
By the end of the school year, there are between 250,000 and 300,000 Teams and 65,000 to 80,000 Teams must be archived. Then the same number of Teams must be deleted from the archives. Using Micosoft365 native tools to manage this Teams lifecycle was a challenge but with sapio365, deadlines were met, the environment was kept as clean as possible and Microsoft object quotas were met.
“For us, it's not even about the time it saves us. sapio365 allows us to do things that we could not do without it. We can't go delete 80,000 groups with the Azure interface - that's not going to happen. This tool opens doors for us.”
Jeff Edison, Office 365 Administrator, Enterprise Applications
Fulton County School
Like many other schools, FCS' environment has many legacy applications that are connected to their on-prem Active Directory and so they have a hybrid environment. sapio365 allows them to see both environments in one place at the same time. FCS also runs both a production tenant and a test tenant. Exporting and manipulating data from the production tenant to the test tenant is easy even with a very large environment.
Using PowerShell scripts had led to unexpected errors with far-reaching ramifications that led to the team seeking out sapio365. The team now relies on sapio365 anytime they need to perform large scale changes. The tool offers 3 valuable capabilities:
The FCS team rely on sapio365 to inform them on the status of their current environment before strategies are developed. They obtain details that can help validate hypotheses and “what-if” scenarios. The team can make changes and run a report to show proof that accounts have been fixed. This opens a lot of possibilities as large decisions can now be made without guesswork.
sapio365 provides users with a library of automated jobs so common IT tasks can be performed in much less time. FCS found that using automation allowed them to streamline tasks and avoid having to do them manually.
The customized reporting that sapio365 offers allows the FCS IT team help other departments such as infrastructure or security. The team can use sapio365 to find discrepancies or provide them with details they would not have been able to see before.
FCS appreciate sapio365's customer support. They collaborate often to translate FCS challenges into solutions. While they use sapio356 for managing their groups and Teams, they know that sapio365 has many capabilities that they have yet to tap into.
“We love the customer support as much as we love the product. They are interested in our feedback and in learning how they can improve the product. This really distinguishes them from other software creators.”
Brian Hanna, Office 365 Administrator, Enterprise Applications
Fulton County School