Remote classes with Microsoft Teams in the Community of Madrid
In a few days in March 2020, the world changed.
In Spain, a few days before the decree of general confinement, thousands of students were sent home. This posed a very important and never seen before challenge for their education: how to continue with their classes at a distance?
Following the situation of global confinement and state of emergency decreed in Spain due to the spread of the covid-19 virus, we worked on equipping the public centres of the Autonomous Community of Madrid with the Microsoft Teams tool, which allowed teachers and students to maintain the educational teaching line through remote classes.
The great challenge was to deploy this environment in the shortest possible time. Thanks to our developments we were able to implement it in less than a week; without this development it would have taken more than a month, unfeasible for the client’s needs.
We were able to deploy the environment 400% faster, which allowed us to get it up and running very quickly. In addition, with the continuous debugging we were doing on the scripts, we reached a failure rate in account creation and class assignment of 0.007%.
The process
The first thing we did was to create a PowerShell solution to be able to process the information sent by the Community of Madrid corresponding to schools, students and teachers, in an automated way.
In addition, we developed a ticketing system for the management and control of incidents with Microsoft Forms, Flow and Power Apps so that users could report the incident.
An environment with functionalities included in a single tool to which activities and resources can be added was made available to teachers and students in the Community of Madrid.
Due to the covid-19 and the impossibility for students to go to the schools, the development by Plain Concepts of this new infrastructure has provided the necessary tools to continue with the teaching activity
David Cervera, Deputy Director General of Innovation and Training Programmes, Regional Ministry of Education and Youth of the Community of Madrid.
Results
- Deployment of the entire infrastructure is 400% faster than with standard tools.
- More than 700,000 Microsoft 365 users divided into classes where users can communicate and perform collaborative tasks.
- Automation of the incident resolution process, so that we were able to process up to 1000 requests per day, when manually we could handle at most 50, which optimised the process by 2000%
We are ready for new challenges
