An organization per department or lab
Central IT runs one deployment; each faculty, lab or admin office gets an isolated organization. Row Level Security keeps a department's pages and tickets invisible to the rest.
Feature details
Education & research
One platform for every department, lab and office. Each in its own space.
Universities are decentralised by design: departments, campuses and labs pick tools independently, which is how student data ends up in a dozen vendors nobody vetted. Tenon lets central IT offer one workspace with an isolated organization per unit, tied to the campus identity provider.
Recommended: Self-hosted Enterprise (campus data centre), or Tenon Cloud per department
6major universities breached in 2025
Harvard, Penn, NYU, Princeton, Dartmouth and Columbia all suffered high-profile incidents in 2025. Departments engaging vendors independently, bypassing central IT, makes consistent oversight hard.
Source: FERPA Compliance in 2026, Virtru
What goes wrong today
The three problems we hear most from education & research.
- Tool sprawl by departmentEach faculty has its own tracker, wiki and chat. Procurement never saw half of them. FERPA obligations travel with the data into tools nobody configured.
- Research projects outlive their toolsA five-year grant passes through three project managers and two collaboration tools. The methodology notes are in someone's personal drive.
- Committees run on emailCurriculum reviews, accreditation self-studies and hiring committees happen in reply-all threads. Decisions are impossible to reconstruct a year later.
How Tenon fits
Four things that change on day one.
Campus SSO, enforced
Connect Shibboleth, Entra or Google Workspace via SAML or OIDC. Password login can be switched off per organization.
Feature detailsCourse and research docs next to the work
Syllabus drafts, lab protocols and self-study chapters are pages inside the project that tracks them, with Word and PDF import for the archive.
Feature detailsCommittee decisions on the record
Each committee is a channel. Polls for quick votes, decision cards for outcomes, and a Decisions tab that answers "what did we agree in March?"
Feature details
In the product
What it looks like for education & research.
A board per course or projectEach department's work in its own organization, with columns that match its process.
Committee decisions, pinnedOutcomes recorded where the discussion happened, findable next year.
Syllabi and protocols as pagesImported from Word, edited in place, linked from the tickets that track them.
Three projects, ready to copy
How to set up the board, the fields and the pages.
These are complete configurations, not suggestions. Create the project, add these columns and custom fields, create the pages, and the rituals column tells you which Tenon features carry the week.
Course development
Build or revise a course with content, review and approval tracked module by module.
Board columns
- Outline
- Drafting
- Peer review
- Accessibility check
- Approved
- Published in LMS
Custom fields
- Module (text)
- Learning outcome (text)
- Term (select)
Pages
- Syllabus
- Module scripts
- Assessment plan
- Accessibility checklist
Rituals
Async weekly update from each contributor. Decision cards for changes to learning outcomes. Public share link for external reviewers.
Research grant programme
Run a multi-year funded project with deliverables, reporting deadlines and a lasting record.
Board columns
- Proposed
- Funded
- In progress
- Analysis
- Writing
- Submitted
- Published
Custom fields
- Work package (select)
- Funder deadline (date)
- Ethics approval (select)
Pages
- Protocol
- Data management plan
- Lab notebook index
- Progress report drafts
Rituals
Timeline against funder milestones. Hill chart for each work package. Brain drafts the progress report from the board and pages each quarter.
Accreditation self-study
Coordinate evidence gathering across departments for an institutional review.
Board columns
- Standard assigned
- Evidence requested
- Drafting
- Steering review
- Final
Custom fields
- Standard (text)
- Department (select)
- Evidence owner (text)
Pages
- Self-study chapters
- Evidence index
- Site visit schedule
Rituals
Portfolio health by standard. Steering committee reads the weekly AI summary. Chapters shared with the visiting team by public link.
A week with Tenon
What Monday, Wednesday and Friday look like.
- Monday: the Faculty of Engineering's organization shows three course revisions in Peer review. One has been there nine days; the stuck flag surfaces it at the programme meeting.
- Wednesday: the grant office asks for a progress report. The PI asks Brain, running on the university's own inference server, for a summary of work package 2. It drafts three paragraphs from the tickets and lab notebook pages; she edits and submits.
- Friday: the curriculum committee votes by poll in its channel. The outcome is a decision card. Next year's committee will find it in ten seconds.
Illustrative scenario based on how teams in this sector describe their week.
Questions
Common questions from education & research.
Is Tenon FERPA-appropriate?
Self-hosted Tenon keeps education records on infrastructure the institution controls, with SSO, role-based organizations and activity logs. Whether a given use involves education records is your policy decision; Tenon gives you the controls to enforce it.
Can students use it?
Yes, as members of an organization (a lab, a student project, a course team). Public share links let you publish pages to students without accounts.
Is there education pricing?
Yes. Contact us with your institution details.
Other industries
Similar problems, different vocabulary.
Set it up for your team this afternoon.
Start free on Tenon Cloud, or self-host it. Copy one of the project setups above and you have a working board in ten minutes.