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Education DLP eDiscovery Ethical Wall

Safe and Supervised Communication in Educational Environments 

BLOG EDUCATION 1

In the ever-evolving landscape of education, ensuring a secure, compliant, and productive environment is paramount for educational institutions. SphereShield is a robust suite of solutions designed to uphold stringent compliance standards while fostering effective communication within educational settings.  

Flexible Communication Policies tailored for Education, with varying communication needs across departments, grade levels, and administrative units, flexible policies empower educational institutes to customize communication rules. This enables adaptability while adhering to compliance requirements, ensuring a seamless yet controlled information flow. 

Let’s explore how each aspect of SphereShield can empower educational institutes: 

Ethical Wall: Fostering Safe Interaction 

Educational institutes deal with sensitive information and diverse user groups. An Ethical Wall ensures controlled interaction among students, teachers, and administrative staff, maintaining confidentiality and preventing unauthorized actions. It creates a safe digital space for collaboration while complying with government privacy regulations. 

Real-Time Content control: Anti-harassment and safe content  

In an educational setting, preventing data leakage is crucial. Sphereshield’s real-time DLP actively inspects content, preventing sensitive data, such as student records or research findings, from being shared inappropriately. Integration with leading DLP vendors ensures comprehensive coverage and adherence to government-mandated data protection regulations. 

Archive & eDiscovery: Effortless Compliance Management- Visible for Teachers/parents 

Maintaining a comprehensive repository of communications is vital for compliance audits and investigations. SphereShield allows educational institutes to effortlessly archive communication data, facilitating easy retrieval based on various parameters. This ensures readiness for regulatory compliance checks and eases the process of providing information for legal or investigative purposes. 

Recording AI Compliance Analysis: Enhancing Educational Governance 

Meetings and classes are integral parts of educational institutions. Recording AI compliance analysis in SphereShield enables institutions to store and analyze meeting transcripts, ensuring adherence to government educational standards. This feature also allows for easy search and retrieval of meetings based on content, aiding in reviewing educational content or teacher-student interactions. 

SphereShield isn’t just a solution; it’s a comprehensive shield that fortifies educational institutes against compliance challenges while enabling smooth and secure communication. With its suite of features tailored for educational governance, it stands as a reliable partner in upholding government-grade compliance standards within the dynamic world of education. 

Learn more

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blog Education Microsoft Teams

Is Microsoft’s Information Barriers solution suitable for Education Tenants?

Recently, Microsoft has made its information barriers solution available to education tenants. In this article, we will cover some scenarios where educational organizations could implement information barriers, and also those aspects where Microsoft did not take steps to improve its features.

Table of contents:

  1. Using collaboration platforms in Education
  2. Information Barriers in Microsoft
  3. Policy-setting limitations and case scenarios for Education Tenants
  4. AGAT’s Solution

1- Using collaboration platforms in Education

As remote work continues to grow, tools that promote communication and collaboration from a distance have expanded too. The education sector has undergone a drastic technological transformation, especially after the pandemic, which pushed many institutions to incorporate online collaboration platforms into their daily activities. Even now, they still prove to be useful not only for distance learning but to complement traditional learning too: better connecting students, faculty, and staff. 

However, introducing technology into the classroom was not as straightforward. For the entire education sector, special needs arose that were not (and in many cases are still not) covered by the available software since it was developed for other purposes. All kinds of educational institutions, from K-12 to college, have faced challenges when it comes to shaping a plan to make collaboration safe for everyone, especially under-age kids.

One of the solutions many institutions started to implement were Information Barriers, a tool to set pertaining restrictions and manage communications between user groups. Information barriers were first ideated for the financial industry but now that the use of collaboration platforms has expanded, they proved to be useful in many scenarios.

information barriers for education tenants

2- Information Barriers in Microsoft

Previously, Microsoft’s Information Barriers were only available on E5 and E3 licenses, now all the Office 365 and Microsoft 365 education plans (A1, A3, and A5) will have access to them. Unfortunately, we can say that Microsoft hasn’t made improvements to its features before extending it to other licenses.

Microsoft’s Information Barriers can be used to set the next restrictions for users:

  • Adding a user to a team or channel
  • Prevent access to meetings
  • Prevent access to 1:1 chats and group chats
  • Prevent access to team or channel content

3- Policy-setting limitations and case scenarios for Education Tenants

As we see, Microsoft provides a solution that can prevent individuals or groups from communicating with each other or unauthorizing certain kinds of collaboration between them, but that’s about it. The problem with the options offered by Microsoft is that they lack flexibility, and many organizations do not want to impose a complete block between internal groups

For example, in a school environment, you might want to allow chat and meetings between teachers and students but, to prevent misconduct, block students from file sharing and screen sharing at the same time. 

Furthermore, to work, Microsoft’s Information barriers policies must be defined two-ways between groups, so they cannot communicate with each other at all. Given this, if you need to restrict students from reaching out privately to teachers but still allow teachers to start communications with students,  it wouldn’t be possible.

4- AGAT’s Solution

AGAT’s Ethical Wall information barriers solution for Microsoft Teams lets you have granular control over which kind of communications you block, for example chat, conferencing, file sharing, or screen sharing. Also, AGAT’s Ethical Wall allows you to set asymmetric policies, where you can choose to block users from reaching out only in one direction.

Finally, AGAT offers an easy-to-use interface to manage all your policies in one place, while Microsoft’s IBs require the use of PowerShell, a tool that can be too complex for non-technical administrators.

 To learn more about SphereShield’s Ethical Wall, contact us today.

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Announcement Education webex guides

Announcing Webex Teams Advanced Controls for Education

AGAT software introduces new Ethical Wall capabilities for Webex (Teams & Meetings) oriented to educational institutions with the label “Webex Teams Advanced Controls for Education”

By leveraging all the power of the Ethical Wall, SphereShield by AGAT is able to offer unique capabilities that suit requests from educational institutions using Webex Teams or MS Teams.

Having Webex Teams offering many degrees of freedom for collaboration and communication can be very useful sometimes, however, there are numerous cases where compliance, security and institutional protocols demand tighter controls and options.

Webex Teams Advanced Controls for Education was created following the requests of expert educators and IT professionals in the education industry. The main goals of this product are to adapt Webex Teams to the most rigorous security and code of conduct requirements and to improve the ongoing communications by providing a safe and reliable environment for both teachers and students.


The list of features explained for Webex Teams Advanced Controls for Education:

🔴Block students from communicating between grades
For example, a 7th grade student communicating with a 4th grade student.

🔴Make sure a teacher is present in every communication

Prevent student-only Spaces. Keep the organization protocols and safety.

🔴Automatically assign moderator role for the Teachers
Just as in the classroom. Avoid uncomfortable situations with students can remove a teacher 

🔴Control who can create Spaces
Allow only selected certain ActiveDirectory group members of the School faculty to create Spaces. Avoid undesired Spaces

🔴Block students from communicating with external users. Even block external users from adding a student to their Space
Restrict all communications outside of the school domain

🔴Control who can add participants to a space
Allow only teachers to add users to a space

🔴Lock down a Space that doesn’t have a teacher
No further communication will be allowed into existing spaces that are not aligned with new policies without losing the content

🔴 Automatically add global moderator to every space
Handle situations in which a space is left without a teacher or when a teacher has left the space. This will allow to add a replacement teacher

🔴Restrict troublemakers to communicate only with teachers.
Avoid risks of student-to-student communications with those of bad behaviour. Instead of removing them from Webex completely

🔴 Detect abusive language or use of sexual language
Inspect content using profanity filters

🔴 Detect adult / pornography / violent content in images

webex education policy 01 eaurle
A diagram of Webex Teams Advanced Control for Education Options


FAQ

Who is Webex Teams Advanced Controls for Education directed to?


Any educational institution from elementary schools to colleges, universities or online courses that use Webex Teams as their Unified Communications platform

How complicated is it to operate? Do you need a special administrator to run policies?


Webex Teams Advanced Controls for Education was designed for an easy operation, allowing less tech-savvy users to operate it with a minimal learning curve.
One or more administrators can be configured for setting policies.

What is the pricing of Webex Teams Advanced Controls for Education?


Webex Teams Advanced Controls for Education price varies by amount of users and other extra features required. On top of that, educational institutions receive special education pricing.

Is there a Demo?

Contact our sales team today and they will be able to let you interact with a Free Demo

Is this service available for Microsoft Teams and other platforms?


By the time of this announcement, SphereShield Ethical Wall for Microsoft Teams will be counting with the same features that Webex Teams Advanced Controls for Education has applied to Microsoft Teams.
We are working on integrating these new capabilities into Slack and Zoom and will announce when they are live.

 

 

AGAT Software is a certified solution provider for Cisco Webex Teams and Meetings

To learn about SphereShield Ethical Wall for Webex Teams and meetings click here