Edunao is transforming access to online learning with Microsoft Azure

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With more than 200 platforms installed by its teams for almost two million users, Edunao is one of the leading driving forces behind the digital transformation of online learning in France, Belgium, Switzerland, and North Africa. This open-source software publisher offers consulting, publishing, and technical integration services for learning platforms on a Moodle platform and hosted in a Microsoft Azure environment. With more than 10 years of experience in digital education, Edunao has become an expert in digital learning.

For more than 10 years, its staff has been engaged in the improvement of access to learning, making Edunao one of the top players in education and training. The digital campus publisher takes pride in improving learning in schools, universities, businesses, and training organizations.

Today, digital campuses and learning management systems have become digital transformation projects involving numerous stakeholders: trainers and teachers, learners, and functional or technical administrators. The technologies on offer from Edunao are fully modular, enabling trainers to deliver courses to just a handful of learners, such as in a university, a training organization, or a company.

These centric platforms are installed at the heart of the organization's information system. In other words, they must be connected to both the functional administration and the technical administration systems. They are also linked to teaching and co-working tools, such as Office 365, and to content-creation tools.

A scalable, user-friendly, and secure platform

Edunao wanted to implement its solution by teaming up with a partner engaged in educational activities and capable of combining optimized hosting solutions with teaching tools.

The platform must address the needs of a broad panel of customers. Both educational establishments and businesses are in the process of digitizing their courses and training materials. The goal therefore consisted in providing them with an SaaS-type online platform and supporting them with both the infrastructure and the software applications in order to keep pace with the latest market developments.

The platform must also enable learners to follow courses in a structured environment integrating several services and applications, including academic enrollments, a payment system, an agenda management application, and email.

The expert in digital learning wanted to host its solution in an environment incorporating a range of cloud services that can be used to create, deploy and manage applications on an extended network of datacenters, enabling it to outsource the IT infrastructure in France, Europe, or worldwide in order to remain close to the user organizations at all times.

With its in-depth knowledge of the workings and the challenges of the world of learning, Microsoft was Edunao's perfect technological partner.

Microsoft: the ideal partner for large-scale projects

Microsoft is enabling Edunao to take part in the digitization of learning processes with a digital campus solution that is open to all. The Microsoft Azure host environment offers users the support or infrastructure operations delegation models that meet their needs. Thanks to this SaaS solution, organizations can focus exclusively on the functional activity of defining their learners' curricula, because all the platform's maintenance and technical support tasks are totally outsourced.

Edunao also opted to use the open-source Moodle learning management system in an effort to offer an upgradable platform. "We wanted to develop an open-source digital campus based on Moodle in order to offer the broadest range of functionality on the market as an online service. Today, Microsoft is one of the biggest contributors to open source and has become a truly outstanding, top-quality partner for us!" explains Edunao's CEO Cyril Bedel. "The advantage with open source is that you can modify the source code of the solution to address the specific needs of the company that uses it."

As a consequence, Edunao can benefit from a complete range of available resources. The solution is based on the services managed by Azure that are executed in a high-availability environment that includes patches and support. Microsoft can guarantee a high degree of scalability, openness, agility, and security that enables Edunao to concentrate on its solution rather than on the environment in which it is carried out. A solution that is secure, efficient, and easy to use for learners.

What is more, the solution can interface with the management systems, the training scheduling systems, the trainers' timetables, the collection of results, the assessment tasks, the learning monitoring systems, and Office 365 to offer a 360° vision of the organization's activity.

An experience available on tablets and smartphones

The content production experience on offer to the users enables them to focus exclusively on their teaching tasks. Edunao also undertakes to provide a functional and conceptual integration solution, for an intuitive and simplified experience available on tablets and smartphones.

"Today's users are looking for an effective solution, with high standards of availability and security, that is interoperable with third-party systems. Edunao combines the technical and the teaching know-how required to do this," continues the CEO. "Today, Microsoft is one of Edunao's key partners and supports our expertise on an international scale."