Elly Yates-Roberts |
The University of Oxford has become one of the largest users of Microsoft Power Apps in the UK, using the solution to modernise and speed up IT and administrative processes.
The education provider, which teaches around 25,000 students every year, has created a range of apps to handle course fees, funding applications, assigning colleges, ID cards, email accounts, child services and travel insurance for staff.
“If we didn’t have the Power Platform or Microsoft 365, we would be in a very challenging situation,” said Matthew Castle, head of application platforms in central IT Services at the university. “We would be looking to next year and trying to figure out how we going to interview 25,000 students and help them prepare for life at our university. It’s a lot of work that’s made easier by using Power Apps to automate many of the manual and repetitive tasks that our staff have to do. This frees up time that our staff can use to focus on more pressing matters.”
The university to planning on build on this success by using Power Automate, which Microsoft says will “empower more departments to create their own solutions to specific problems that their staff may have”.
“PowerApps is putting organisations in control of their data,” said Chris Rothwell, director of education at Microsoft UK. “The Power Platform tools are perfect for any team that wants to increase agility, solve problems and improve how they work. I am inspired by how the University of Oxford is using this technology.”