Some third-party applications may request to use your Susquehanna University account for sign-in purposes, or for integration purposes (to access your SU user, mail, calendar, contact, or OneDrive data – or perhaps shared resources like data in SU Teams or SharePoint sites you are a member of). Not all third-party apps are trustworthy or appropriate for use in our environment. The first time an app attempts to authenticate into our environment, it will require IT admin consent. You will see a prompt similar to the one below:
This is required, as approving the application request for you, automatically approves the application for all users in the entire organization going forward. IT will need some time to review the request and research the application, the vendor’s privacy policy and reputation, and to assess what data the app is requesting. We will also verify that we do not already have a comparable app in place that we already recommend and support.
For example, we are unlikely to approve third-party mail and calendaring applications for a few reasons:
- They typically request the most amount of sensitive information, so assessing what information they access, transmit, and store is critical. We are very careful to assess their privacy policy and reputation. An example is Edison Mail, a commonly requested app. Their privacy policy indicates that they scan your mail to monetize the content, which we do not approve of. Additionally, they experienced a major bug in 2020 that allowed other users to access each other’s email.
- Mail and calendar functionality are some of the most utilized workflows, which also create the most volume of support requests. To ensure that we can support our services, we only permit our approved mail and calendar apps (Outlook for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android; built in iOS/Android mail/calendar/contacts, Apple Mail, and Windows Mail).
- Email is the most vulnerable target for cybersecurity attacks (for phishing, spamming, and impersonation), so we need to place the most security around these services.
Another example of an application we wouldn’t approve would include integration apps for Slack, since our recommended platform is Slack’s competitor, Microsoft Teams. We would ask that Microsoft Teams, the comparable product that we have already invested licensing, setup, and support into, is used instead.
Examples we are very likely to approve include, Prezi, Pear Deck, or apps from major textbook publishers for academic needs, as they have high-merit, aren’t redundant to any officially supported apps, request very little data access, and/or are considered trusted sources.
If you have concerns that one of your requested apps was not approved, you may email helpdesk@susqu.edu to open up a service request for additional context.