June 30, 2026

Prograds: Securing Universities Access with Seamless SSO Integration

Prograds - founded in 2021 by Fred Cutler - was born out of a simple but powerful observation: program leadership and staff are among the only people on a university campus without a dedicated software built for what they do. Tracking student progress in post-graduate programs had long been a fragmented, spreadsheet-heavy process frustrating for program directors, faculty members, administrators, and students alike.

Fred Cutler launched Prograds after spending years as a graduate student himself, followed by two decades supervising students as a Professor of Political Sciences at the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Canada. His vision was clear: give every key stakeholder from program leadership to the students themselves a single source of truth about each student's journey through their program's milestones and requirements. He built it himself on Bubble platform and today, multiple universities in the USA & Canada are actively using it to eliminate the chaos of emails and spreadsheets and replace it with clarity, alignment, and seamless collaboration.
We engaged with Prograds in 2025 and what followed was one of our most rewarding security and identity management journeys to date.

Challenges

Strict Universities Compliance Requirements around identity management and data access that left no room for compromise
Manual Login and Access Management for students and staff creating friction, inefficiencies, and more complexity
No SSO Integration meaning every user managed separate credentials outside the university's existing identity ecosystem
University IT Governance Policies that required full alignment with institutional security standards
Multi University Rollout Complexity requiring a solution that could scale across universities without post-deployment issues

Solution

SSO Implementation to integrate Prograds seamlessly into each university's existing identity infrastructure
Full Compliance Alignment with institutional IT governance and security policies across different universities
Centralized Access Management enabling university IT teams to control user provisioning and deprovisioning from their own systems
Rigorous Pre-Deployment Testing to ensure a smooth GO-Live with zero disruption to students and staff
Scalable SSO Architecture designed to onboard additional universities without starting from scratch each time
Permium technical support services with strict SLAs put in place to guarantee that no single user is blocked from logging-in

Results

Successful Go-Live across universities with zero post-deployment issues reported
Eliminated Credential Friction for students and staff who now access Prograds through their existing university credentials
Full Compliance with strict university IT governance and security requirements across all universities
Centralized Access Control giving university IT teams full visibility and control over user access
Scalable Foundation for onboarding additional universities with a proven, repeatable SSO integration model
Increased Trust and Credibility for Prograds as a platform that meets the security bar of regulated academic institutions

The Full Picture

Universities are not your average enterprise customers. They operate under strict IT governance frameworks, data protection regulations, and institutional security policies that must be met before any third-party platform is granted access to their staff and student directories.

For Prograds, this meant that without a robust, compliant SSO (Single Sign-On) integration, expanding to new university clients was simply not an option. Before our engagement, users accessed Prograds through manual login flows entirely disconnected from the universities' own identity ecosystems. This created real pain: staff and students had to manage yet another set of credentials, IT departments had no centralized control over access, and the platform couldn't meet the security bar that university procurement and IT teams required.

"The absence of SSO wasn't just a UX inconvenience, it was a hard blocker for growth." Fred Cutler – Founder & CEO at Prograds

How We Made It Happen

We approached this engagement knowing that the stakes were high and the margin for error was essentially zero. Universities run on academic calendars; a failed or delayed GO-Live doesn't just inconvenience users, it disrupts program operations at critical moments.

Our first step was a deep dive into the IT requirements and compliance frameworks of each university. While they relied on "Microsoft Entra ID" as their Identity Provider (IdP), each had its own specific policies, approval workflows, and security expectations that had to be addressed individually.

We implemented SSO on Bubble platform, integrating Prograds directly into each university's "Microsoft Entra ID" tenant. This meant that students and staff could log in to Prograds using their existing institutional credentials.No new passwords, no separate accounts, and full visibility for university IT administrators over who has access and when.

Beyond the technical implementation, a significant part of our work involved navigating the compliance and governance layer: preparing the necessary documentation, aligning with IT security teams, and ensuring that every aspect of the integration met institutional standards before a single GO-Live was approved.

We've faced edge cases like students with Prograds email addresses different than the one used at their university, however we handled these cases efficiently with zero disruption and no manual intervention.

"We have a scalable SSO architecture that already integrates with different identity providers (IdPs) which enables us to easily onboard new universities in a matter of days. However, the strict security policies for universities didn't even give us a chance to have a test user so we had to rigorously test before deployment and finally we went Live with zero post-deployment issues reported. The edge cases also forced us to refactor the whole login process in Prograds so that even users with different email addresses can login seamlessly." Ahmed ELKAFFAS – Founder at Effortless Solutions

Results

The impact was felt immediately. By the time we went live across different universities, there were no support tickets, no login failures, no security flags raised by university IT teams. The rollout was smooth precisely because of the rigorous preparation that preceded it.

Students and faculty staff no longer needed to remember a separate set of Prograds credentials; they simply log in with their university account, just as they would for any other institutional platform.

For IT administrators, the integration means that when a student graduates or a staff member leaves, their access to Prograds is automatically revoked through the university's own systems. No manual cleanup, no disallowed access risks.

For Prograds, the SSO integration didn't just solve a security problem; it opened a door. Universities that previously couldn't consider the platform due to compliance requirements can now evaluate it with confidence.

"Implementing SSO the right way wasn't just about meeting a checkbox; it was about building the trust that allows universities to say yes to Prograds with confidence. In fact Effortless Solutions layed out options and expectations. They then executed the work very effectively, along the way making suggestions that helped us restructure our Bubble workflows and database. This was a full solution to enable us to do SSO integration in the future with multiple universities using different identity systems." Fred Cutler – Founder & CEO at Prograds

Final thoughts

Our journey with Prograds is a testament to what becomes possible when security and user experience are treated as equally important. SSO is often seen as a purely technical requirement, but in the university context, it is the bridge between an innovative platform and institutional trust.

By implementing a compliant, scalable SSO integration across different universities with no post-deployment issues we helped Prograds cross that bridge and position itself for continued growth in the academic sector.

Fred Cutler built Prograds to give graduate students and program leadership the clarity they deserve. We're proud to have built the secure foundation that makes that clarity accessible to more universities every day.