Identity support and expertise

TrainingPlus enables you to get identity training, mentoring and ad hoc support at discounted rates. Flexible and cost-effective, you get the help as and when you need it. It’s especially particularly popular with education organizations.

Read two case studies: a university in the UK | a university in the Caribbean

Having discovered the expertise of our instructors and consultants, many identity professionals who have attended our training courses come back to us for ad hoc, informal mentoring and support. Our TrainingPlus packages have been designed to meet this need.

Our TrainingPlus packages provide identity expertise on tap at discounted rates. Let us help you resolve minor issues, sanity check your plans, train and mentor your staff, and offer an extra pair of hands at busy times. TrainingPlus is particularly popular with education organizations.

Case study: a university in the UK

Our customer Neil, an Infrastructure Systems Administrator at a UK university, explains why he thinks TrainingPlus is a “no brainer”.

Our university’s IT team found the identity training with OCT so helpful that when we discovered a way to get pretty much instant access to their expertise through Training Plus it was a no brainer. Having an identity expert on hand to discuss things with and help us devise practical, workable solutions to problems as they arise is so great. It saves us so much time and money knowing we’re doing the right thing the first time. Having Paul [OCT consultant, instructor and identity expert] work with us has been great. Just what we needed. He is so good at MIM, it’s fantastic

The original implementers of the MIM infrastructure at a UK university were leaving the institution, so it was important for other members of the IT team to improve their MIM and Azure AD (now Microsoft Entra ID) knowledge. At least three members of their team have between them, taken 6+ of our courses, including all three of our MIM courses, as well as our Microsoft Entra Connect (formerly Azure AD Connect) Masterclass and John Craddock’s Identity Masterclass.

The training helped them to identify several pain points in their current implementation:

Documentation: There was little or no documentation of the identity infrastructure or the identity management automated processes.
Redundant MAs: Some MAs were no longer required and needed to be removed from the solution.
Best practice analysis: They wanted the implementation to follow Microsoft’s best practices, especially underlying Windows components reaching end-of-life support.
Test environment: Their Change Control processes for the production environment required accurate information regarding updates to MIM and to Windows components and features.

How TrainingPlus helped

The university’s identity team was keen to manage the work themselves, but they wanted us to look over their plans in case they had missed anything or got anything wrong. They also wanted a bit of confidence-boosting “hand-holding” to get going. They therefore opted for a TrainingPlus package.

However, during the implementation of their test environment (a copy of their production environment), it became clear that they encountered problems each year when provisioning new students which they had to correct manually.

So they asked us to refocus our attention on identifying some of the major causes of these issues and to work on fixes. And the flexibility offered by TrainingPlus packages meant that this was possible.

We then monitored the provisioning process for this year’s students to verify the fixes. In doing so, we helped identify and mitigate the biggest issues, and the provisioning process ran very smoothly, with fewer manual corrections required.

Case study: a university in the Caribbean

It was great working with you and Paul and the rest of the OCT team. We’ve been able to accomplish a lot as a result of what you were able to provide. We will be in touch again!

We had already run some private MIM and Azure AD (now Microsoft Entra ID) courses for the identity team at a university in the Caribbean. Next, they asked us for help with the implementation of their test environment and develop several workflows. These workflows involved running scripts that updated identities in Azure AD (now Microsoft Entra ID) – particularly around license management.

They built the test environment themselves. The TrainingPlus package they bought enabled us to demonstrate the implementation of MIMWAL, and how to write the required workflows using those activities. We then applied MIMWAL to their production environment. Following our demos in the test environment, they completed a successful rollout of the workflows in the production environment themselves.

How does TrainingPlus work?

When you buy TrainingPlus vouchers, you’ll get training, ad hoc mentoring, and identity support at a discount on our standard rates. So if you buy $10,000 worth of TrainingPlus vouchers, you get support and training worth $11,500 over a year. At the end of the year, unused vouchers can be rolled into a new package.

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Any questions? Contact us!

My colleague Mark Forbes will be delighted to answer any questions you may have about TrainingPlus. You can contact him at +44 (0)1865 521200 or +1 425-577-6542, or by email.