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UMS Helpdesk and Community Communication sent on Jan 19, 2024, concerning the disablement of OneDrive integration in Brightspace.
Detailed Information
Good morning All,
After working with D2L and our Azure Admins, for the last 7 weeks, we come bearing less-than-desirable news. It seems our OneDrive integration in BRSP has fundamentally changed. Microsoft no longer supports the legacy connection we have been leveraging to allow students and instructors access to their OneDrive as a file browser location when uploading files in Brightspace. We learned in this process that Microsoft had engaged in developing an LTI 1.3 integration to be used in BRSP more directly, which was meant to replace it. However, the partnership requires an overly permitted access point, posing a security risk to our University OneDrive and Sharepoint tools, if we tie them into BRSP.
In addition to the permissions issue, when setting the LTI up in our TEST environment; we discovered that the new LTI was visible to all users, including students who may wish to use it for submitting assignments in their courses, but only functional to those with an Instructor IMS mapping, meaning it would be useless for students, and more likely to cause an uptick in unresolvable helpdesk requests and frustration for our collective student community.
When Discussing the technical issues with our LMS Vendor D2L, Support Agents and Developers offered the following response:
"After meeting with our Partners and Development Team we were able to confirm that, at this time, there is nothing that can be done in terms of those permissions. When we mentioned your concerns about the integration itself being broken in a lot of areas, they will be actively working on improving it in all aspects. We know this isn't what we would like to communicate but as we discussed in our meetings your best course of action would be to use Google as you can manage it a lot more closely with what you decide to have on there."
After careful consideration of this news and much troubleshooting, we have decided to disable the OneDrive application within Brightspace's File Picker tool for all users.
For students and Faculty attaching files to BRSP, we recommend the following workflow.
Either:
1. Downloading files to your local computer, and attaching them via the "Add files>from my computer",
or
2. Storing and attaching them from GoogleDrive.
Thank you for your attention in this matter,
USIT: SDS-Teaching and Learning Team
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