Microsoft Intune is a cloud-based service that focuses on the management of devices connected to a system. Microsoft Intune provides a wealth of options, from setting up which websites the devices within a system can access, to extracting data of all the devices linked to that system through the management of Microsoft Graph API endpoints. For the purpose of this module, we will be focusing on the collection and use of the "devices" data within Azure Synapse Analytics.
You can use this Open Education Analytics (OEA) Microsoft Intune Reports module to incorporate device data into your organization's Synapse data lake.
(Microsoft documentation on Intune: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/fundamentals/what-is-intune)
As education systems and institutions begin to incorporate more digital forms of learning, understanding the number of students without access to devices outside of school is vital. This "devices" data can be combined with other data sources (such as Azure Active Directory or Microsoft Education Insights data), to get a real time view of student use of devices especially outside physical school to ensure all students have sufficient ‘digital access’ for learning. This can also be combined with school and class rosters, attendance, and grades from Student Information Systems to produce visualizations that help with intervention targeting.
Microsoft Intune Reports data can be used for many different education purposes:
- School and district dashboards for education leaders to observe trends in student device access and inclusion outside of school.
- Reports on students with multiple devices registered and ownership of the devices.
- School dashboards on a statistical breakdown of operating systems (OSs) being used by students.
Ingesting data using this Microsoft Intune module provides solutions to these scenarios, as well as many more instances to extract the devices used for and within school systems.
This Microsoft Intune module for OEA will leverage Azure Synapse Analytics to aid education systems in bringing this data to their own Azure data lake for analysis. This includes a pipeline for extracting device data from Microsoft Intune through the Microsoft Graph API endpoint manager, providing a more detailed and accurate representation of student device accessibility outside of school. The PowerBI template included in this module can be used by system and school leaders to show:
- Which devices are linked to an education system:
- Number of students with more than one device
- Day and time of day of last device check in
- Number of devices based on different OSs (i.e. Windows, iOS/iPadOS, macOS, Android)
- Number of devices based on ownership (i.e. Corporate/School, Personal, Unknown)
This dashboard example represent only data from Microsoft Intune. When this data is combined with other data sources, they can illustrate how device patterns can relate to student demographics, etc. With such combined data, education systems can start to analyze whether new programs or interventions help to improve teaching and learning with digital tools.
- Microsoft Intune Reports is used to collect "devices" data, as mentioned above. The data available includes all devices connected within a system, as well as the primary user principal name (UPN) connected to the device, and their last check in date/time on this device.
- This data is formatted in CSV files; both the sample datasets and your own data ingested through the pipeline are landed in this format.
- You will need a subscription to Microsoft Intune or Office 365 (for Education), in order to access the Intune data used in this module: click here to learn more about how to sign up Intune for Education purposes.
- Import the Graph Reports API pipeline template for Intune into your Synapse workspace, connect a Graph API linked service, and trigger the pipeline.
- Load and run the Intune Reports module notebook into your Synapse workspace. Two spark databases (s2np_intune and s2p_intune) will be created.
- Download the Power BI template file Intune Reports Module Dashboard and connect to your Synapse workspace serverless SQL endpoint. We recommend using a directQuery from the s2p_intune database.
Out-of-the box assets for this OEA module include:
- Tutorial/Instructions: A tutorial and instructions of how to use this module within your own Synapse workspace, as well as demonstration to build custom queries to pull data for your education tenant from Microsoft Intune via Microsoft Graph Reports API.
- Test data: Ingest sample data to understand the utility and functionality of the notebook(s).
- Pipeline(s): A pipeline which connects Microsoft Intune via Microsoft Graph API endpoint manager, to the Synapse workspace.
- Notebook(s): An example notebook on processing the data from stage 1 to stage 2 within Synapse.
- PowerBI Templates: A Power BI sample template making it easy to interact with Microsoft Intune data.
The Microsoft Intune module welcomes contributions....
This module was developed by the Open Education Analytics teams and volunteers from the 2021 Microsoft Global Hackathon in partnership with Kwantum Analytics. The architecture and reference implementation for all modules is built on Azure Synapse Analytics - with Azure Data Lake Storage as the storage backbone, and Azure Active Directory providing the role-based access control.
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