Outlook and user permissions?

[Jake]

From somewhere out of left field the new head of ICT brought up a desire to educate the students on outlook emails and all that jazz. Up to this stage none of our students have emails.

So the thought occured to me, if they are using outlook , will they be able to fart arse around with their outlook settings? If so, is there anyway to restrict what options in outlook are available to them?

[Lee_K_81]

Your should be able to download the Office 2003 GPO's off M$ to restrict them, BUT passing all the POP settings etc to the machines will be a bit of a pain. If the head is serious about this and wants to push email as a tool, now might be the time to suggest exchange server. All the kids could use Outlook Web Access (OWA), and you can set the accounts to only send/recieve internally effectievly letting them play in a sandbox. The OWA offers the basic functionallity of outlook, but wont let them bugger up the rest of the settings.

Depends if you are anti M$ and dont want your email via exchange though.

[Jake]

Yeah , we have an exchange server and OWA running on our admin network at the moment, just nothing for curriculum.

[Lee_K_81]

Do the kids have any school email set-up?
Licensing is around £1 for the CALS so depending on your budget / number of kids you want it for might be worth a shot. Even if it's only just for using an address book, sending an email, adding attachments, task lists, calendar etc.

[tarquel]

OWA for the kids - much easier for you and less large Outlook archives floating around the network....

Plus, I think I read that Exchange 2003 Device / User CALs dont include the use of Microsoft Outlook 2003 any more....

OWA, of course, is allowed

And of course, if you have Office 2k3 Pro on all the machines then it doesnt matter naturally

Cheers
Nath.

[Jake]

No the kids dont have any email setup, SMT choose a while ago to not allow students external email. Even this solution will be purely for internal, only staff have external mail.

Yeah we have office 2003 so no probs there, was really just their ability to fiddle with their outlook settings that I was concerned with

[Lee_K_81]

OWA seems best option in honesty. Atlest that way you can stop external email, but still allow kids to access it out of school, and email homework (lol, like that ever happens) to teachers.

[Jake]

OWA looking like the route then, though we wont be letting them access it from out of school yet, its just for an internal usage of outlook so that the head of ict can teach a few lessons on outlook

Maybe sometime down the line SMT will authorise more use of it though