Australian Catholic University taps Espire Infolabs for Microsoft-powered anti-spam technology

Managed services provider Espire Infolabs has deployed Microsoft Power Platform for Australian Catholic University (ACU) to make it easier to obey strict anti-spam laws, boost enrolment and improve student services. 

ACU’s chief information officer Niranjan Prabhu said before engaging long-time partner Espire, the university had not synchronised data on its roughly 33,000 students and more than 125,000 alumni. 

Prabhu said this put ACU at risk of being fined millions of dollars for breaching Australia’s anti-spam laws by sending emails to alumni and students through one system when they had opted out of receiving them through the other system. 

ACU’s alumni engagement solution, Graduway, had no application programming interface to sync data with the university’s main system, which was based on Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement.

Prabhu told CRN that within a two-week timeframe, the Indian-headquartered, Microsoft gold partner Espire was able to deploy Microsoft Power Platform, synchronise both systems and build robotic process automation BOTs: also called desktop flows.

“Espire has not just supported ACU in implementation of Alumni Engagement Platform (Graduway) but also helped in building three BOTs.”

“Two for synchronising CRM and Graduway on opt-out data and one BOT for pushing Alumni Engagement analytics to CRM for better and meaningful outreach to Alumni cohort.” 

Prabhu said that on a daily basis, Power Automate cloud flow triggered one bot to fetch user subscription and alumni analytics data from the Graduway system and creates a file, which would then be uploaded to a SharePoint location. And from there, another cloud flow would be triggered to update the University’s Dynamics 365 database.

Prabhu said leveraging Microsoft Power Platform’s automation and data analytics capabilities had other benefits for ACU in addition to helping the University obey anti-spam laws, including boosting enrolment and improving student services. 

“Because the data from both systems is in sync, ACU’s alumni engagement team can generate analytics reports with more insights to help them run successful campaigns and improve the university’s career development services,” Prabhu said in a statement. 

“We can also use these insights to improve our engagement with prospective students and to boost student enrolment.”

Prabhu said ACU chose Espire to upgrade the system for four reasons. 

“Espire Infolabs has been Microsoft Gold Partner for years, Espire’s understanding of ACU technology landscape, Espire’s well-established M365 and Power Platform Centre of Excellence, and Espire’s successful past engagements on various Microsoft technology-based projects for ACU.”