Synchronise and integrate with Microsoft One roster (Teams)

If you wish to integrate MySchool with Microsoft education packages (Teams etc) this is possible via our synchronisation tool kit. We achieve this via MS SDS One roster.

Please note that Microsoft set-up and directory management cannot be supported nor administered by the MySchool team. Your school will need to have access to an IT specialist who understands the Microsoft 365 administrator environment. 

Microsoft offers various documents and walkthroughs to assist you. Before starting the integration process, please make sure that you understand the configuration path;

• SDS requirements
• Microsoft 365
• Managing mail users in Active directory
• Adding users to Microsoft

SDS setup needs to have

• An Office 365 Education tenant
• Global Administrator Permissions

What can be synchronised?

Sync centre will PUSH your MySchool enrolment data to your Microsoft platform every night, around 00h00 local time. If you change enrolment details for a student on MySchool, then this will show on Microsoft rosters the next day.

We are able to push;

• Academic Years
• Terms
•  Classes
  • Includes enrolled students
  • Includes Teachers
• Subjects
  • Course relationship to the subject
• Courses
  • Includes enrolled students
  • Includes Teachers
• Teachers
• Students

Can we synchronise if we have Teams set up already?

Yes. During the set-up phase, one of the first requirements is to choose whether you require the API to create new users on your active directory or update existing users already created within your directory. So both are possible.

Can we synchronise future and past years' data?

We can only synchronise for the active MySchool academic year. Previous years will not be synchronised. You will need to enable and check the new courses/classes in the LIS pages after your MySchool rollover is complete.

What about assignments?

We cannot synchronise with the assignment module in Teams.

We don't know what to do with Microsoft

We do urge you to have expert knowledge of the Microsoft platform, although we can advise checking certain settings, we cannot be responsible for supporting this. Again, please make sure you have checked out the comprehensive Microsoft knowledge base about this.

• Welcome
• Planning checklist
• Deploy using API
• Video

Phase 1: Your staff and students must have a valid Microsoft licence or be registered in the active directory

The unique identifier for synchronisation is the MySchool primary email field in student and staff profiles. This must be identical to your MS active directory. If you need to update your email addresses in MySchool, we have the mass edit tool which can help update records quickly if needed.

Phase 2: Inform your CSM about your project and organise a meeting

During this meeting, we will go through the steps and add some new pages to your MySchool instance. the items to be discussed will be:

• Determine who is the prime IT contact within your school. If this user is external to your school, we will ask you as the MySchool Superuser to act as an intermediary for communications and action points. We will need their e-mail address.
• We will also need your tenant id from Microsoft.
• During this meeting, you will be asked to confirm that you have read the Microsoft instructions. 
• In administer/advanced options, we will add the pages LIS courses, and LIS classes. The access to these pages will be controlled by the role of Learning information services. We will normally add this to your super user group.

• The pages are simple and once the synchronisation is enabled, they will populate with your MySchool course and class lists. You can then select Should sync school, which will activate the daily synchronisation. Select the respective courses and classes on the right. Both pages need to have the should sync school enabled.

Phase 3: Receive the security credentials

Following the meeting, we will send the tenant id and the contact details to our development team. They will prepare a secure access token (Amazon simple storage service S3). The token will have a limit of 24hrs access for you to download. The designated person on your side, must recover the token and start the synchronisation process on your Microsoft platform. The details contained in this email should contain 

• Web access URL - You need to take the URL used to access your MySchool instance and add /ims/oneroster/v1p1

E.g: https://myschoolinstanceurl/ims/oneroster/v1p1

• Client id
• Client secret code

Phase 4: Add these details to the SDS roster

You can now build and test the synchronisation within your Microsoft admin panel with the above details.

Check out the Microsoft article explaining the steps.

We connect with Teams via API ONLY. We should be listed as an accredited API supplier.

Once you have completed the configuration on Microsoft, we will wait for 24hrs for the automated synchronisation to be actioned. Check your Teams the following day to verify if this has been updated.

Please make sure that the correct courses are selected in the LIS screens we set up in Phase 2. if the sync school field is not checked the sync will not work.