The Colombian university revamped its IT Service Desk by integrating it with Microsoft Teams to provide better support to the more than 60,000 members of its university community.
EAFIT is a higher education institution with over 60 years of experience in the Colombian education system. Under the motto “inspire, radiate, and forge,” it contributes to the sustainable development of humanity through programs that encourage lifelong learning, promote discovery and creativity, and foster interaction with the surrounding community, all within a spirit of integrity, excellence, pluralism, and inclusion.
Since 2005, the University has been using Aranda Software’s management tools to centralize information from its various departments. However, over the years, they began to recognize the need to expand the support channels of the IT Service Desk to better serve their IT users.
In response to the pandemic, EAFIT moved all its educational processes to Microsoft Teams for Education, a solution that brings together classes, meetings, assignments, files, and collaboration in one place. Having witnessed the benefits of the tool, the university decided to maximize its potential and integrated the solution with its Service Desk tool.
To this end, we worked with EAFIT to develop a bot that automatically creates user requests in their service management tool and allows users to check the status of those requests. “Our service catalog is extensive—it includes 22 services for users and 900 for internal staff,” says Diana Ramírez, Head of the IT Services Department at EAFIT. “The bot has helped us improve productivity and efficiency,” she adds.
Currently, the bot offers nine commands that allow users to select the reason for contacting the IT department. In addition to creating and viewing cases, these commands include the ability to view articles, news, access permissions, and approvals.
This solution was built using various technologies, such as the Bot Framework, which enables interaction with Microsoft Teams channels across desktop, web, and mobile platforms, and also manages conversation flow and detects user identities to facilitate communication between the help desk and Teams; Adaptive Cards, where native components were developed to display information to the user; SQL Server as the database; and other development applications and platforms such as Message Extensions, ReactJS, and .Net.
The bot is currently available in the store as “Aranda Virtual Agent,” and we are continuing to develop it on an ongoing basis.
“Even though we’ve returned to in-person classes, Teams has become established as a management and communication tool”
Diana Ramirez
Head of the IT Services Department – EAFIT
To date, the bot has answered more than 10,000 inquiries from both internal and external sources. “Thanks to this implementation, we’ve been able to reach a wider audience; previously, communication was limited to phone or the web,” notes Wilder Andrés Álvarez, Technical Analyst at EAFIT.
Natalia Escobar, Head of the Treasury Department at EAFIT, notes that the integration of Aranda Software into Teams was a major step forward: “Before, we didn’t submit requests through the IT department because it took too long and was a frustrating process for us as users; now, with the bot, we can report issues very easily.”
The IT department is strengthening the digital learning ecosystem with solutions built on Teams, and in the near future, they will migrate all their processes to the cloud, with a particular focus on a robust cybersecurity strategy.
Even though we’ve returned to in-person work, Teams has become an established tool for management and communication.