A+ work: A digital school day at Schule Schloss Salem–with Microsoft 365 and Power Platform

Schule Schloss Salem's primary mission is to protect students and provide them with the best possible education. This requires the efficient provision of learning materials. And the ability to easily track the whereabouts of students to fulfill the duty of supervision.

So, with Microsoft 365 and Power Platform, Salem Castle has digitized the daily lives of its students: Study materials are made available through SharePoint, extracurricular activities are organized through Microsoft Teams. And the digital class register makes it easier for Schloss Salem to fulfill its supervisory duties.

Today they are profiting from various benefits: Learning materials are delivered optimized and much faster. As common Office solutions are integrated in their day to day lives, students learn their practical application very early on. And last but not least: In case of emergencies, students can be located very easily.

With 600 students from 47 nations, a staff of 300, and 3 locations, Schule Schloss Salem is Germany’s biggest boarding school for secondary education. Ensuring efficient flows of information in a community like this presents certain challenges: besides classroom lessons, there are extracurricular activities, social services, and cafeteria menus to coordinate. To manage all this, Salem has turned to Microsoft 365.

The challenge: Ensure simple and efficient communication for almost 1,000 people

Schools require a huge amount of administration, and none so much as large boarding schools like Schule Schloss Salem. Salem wants its classroom lessons—not to mention extracurricular activities, mealtimes, clubs, social services, and sports—to be well structured and properly organized. Students, teaching staff, and other employees need a wide array of information about things like class schedules, cases of illness, course materials, or extracurricular activity options. In short, Salem is responsible for its children—for their safety as well as their education. Previously, the school relied on more analog processes, such as bulletin boards. Yet these didn’t guarantee that important information reached all those who needed to know.

“Parents who send their children to our school place enormous trust in us,” says Thomas Obitz, Salem’s managing director and business manager. “Our aim is to provide a safe environment that’s ideal for educating the children and preparing them for their future careers.” Most companies require that their employees have digital skills, so such skills need to be an integral part of living and learning at Salem. “We also need to guarantee the children’s physical safety,” Obitz says. “That’s why we want to know where they are at all times—without infringing on their freedom.” Previously, this was done using lists that were filled out in the evening. But if a student wasn’t in class in the morning or was a no-show at swim practice in the afternoon, staff didn’t find out until later when they reviewed the lists.

To meet this responsibility in the best possible way, Salem needed to fully embrace digitalization and innovation and start building a future in which students can live and learn in a digital environment. To address the various challenges of analog instruction and day-to-day life at a boarding school, Schule Schloss Salem introduced Microsoft 365 and Power Platform.

The solution: A faster, more reliable flow of information with Microsoft 365 and Power Platform

Like most German schools, Salem maintains a “school register” for each student—a document containing information such as attendance, material covered in class, any incidents of note, etc. Until they were digitalized with Microsoft Power Platform, these registers were a physical book that students had to pick up every morning and teachers had to carefully fill out and update. Now the new register app makes it possible to save entries and make them accessible to multiple users. Staff in various departments have access to the data. This means students’ absences due to illness or visits to their parents can be recorded reliably, and if teachers or administrators need to have a conference with parents or guardians, they can export all the relevant data and make it available with one click.

To implement this solution, Salem sought out assistance from Arineo, a member of the Microsoft Partner Network that created a comprehensive digital school register using a canvas app. “There are already several different digital school-register systems on the market. But as a boarding school, Salem needed additional functions not covered by existing solutions. We were able to develop a unique digital register using Power Platform that covered all the needed requirements,” explains Nils Lischka, Microsoft Power Platform Consultant at Arineo. “In doing so, it was especially important to us to ensure a seamless flow of information. Data, regardless of its source, can now be accessed by other authorized persons at any time.” With data from Atlantis, Salem’s master data management system, user accounts were created for the teaching staff and students in Microsoft Tenant and then assigned to courses in Microsoft Teams. The electronic register is a canvas app that is based on Dataverse data tables. Lesson plans come from Untis, the school’s instruction planning system, and is imported into Dataverse via dataflows. With the help of Power Automate flows and Excel scripts, it’s possible to, say, export register contents such as course catalogs and syllabuses with proper formatting.

All data for Salem’s new digital infrastructure is stored securely in Dataverse and is of course GDPR-compliant.

The infrastructure guarantees that all information is available in real time—and without time-consuming maintenance of lists. “In the mornings, teachers see who’s supposed to be present and document any absences in the app. The school office is automatically notified and can look to see where a student last checked in. For instance, they might have gone to the school nurse’s office because they’re sick,” Obitz explains. “This lets us know for sure where our students are and saves us the time of making lots of internal phone calls.”

But as a boarding school, Salem needed additional functions not covered by existing solutions. We were able to develop a unique digital register using Power Platform that covered all the needed requirements.

Nils Lischka, Microsoft Power Platform Consultant, Arineo GmbH

Learning for life with Microsoft Sharepoint and Microsoft Teams

Microsoft 365 has also helped introduce a replacement for the traditional bulletin board: based on SharePoint, the school’s intranet has an area accessible to everyone, as well as a protected tenant solely for the teaching staff. In the former, students and employees can find general information such as the cafeteria menu, extracurricular activities, and class schedules. The latter contains confidential information and is accessible only by staff. Particularly important updates are sent to cell phones as push notifications.

Microsoft Teams supports communication at Salem. As soon as courses and staffing plans for the new school year have been finalized in the school’s administrative software, the data is transmitted to the Microsoft tenant and a team is created for each course in Microsoft Teams. Microsoft’s School Data Sync solution makes it possible to map the school’s dynamic user community and manage it in an optimum way.

“These tools mean it’s not always necessary to have all the students you’re teaching together in a physical classroom, so they’re especially helpful,” Obitz says. Students collaborate on documents, communicate with each other, and have a central place to store homework or course materials.

By using Microsoft 365, the students are also simultaneously getting to know Microsoft solutions, which are standard in many companies around the world. “We set great store by preparing our students as best as possible for the working world; that includes teaching them how to use common software applications and confidently navigate the digital world,” Obitz says.

At Schule Schloss Salem, the digital future is already a reality today: “Our focus is on living and learning, with exceptional teaching, many options for extracurricular activities, and a regular daily schedule. Microsoft 365 and Power Platform reduce the number of analog processes here and create more efficiency, speed, and security in our communication, which in turn benefits our students,” Obitz says. The school has plans to expand the solution to further areas of application—and thus stay at the forefront of the digital transformation.

Microsoft 365 and Power Platform reduce the number of analog processes here and create more efficiency, speed, and security in our communication, which in turn benefits our students.

Thomas Obitz, managing director and business manager, Schule Schloss Salem