Office 365 Sharepoint

[Michael]

Hello all,

 

With the newly released Office 365 based on Exchange 2013, I've been asked to look at Skydrive and other services suitable for Primary schools.

 

Skydrive in Office 365 is integrated with SharePoint Plan 1 for EDU and Office Web Apps for EDU. When clicking the Skydrive tab it's difficult to understand what all the tabs/links are for. It's also very difficult to return back to Outlook or the calendar, so I can't quite see how Microsoft think this is school friendly myself...

 

Ideally I'm looking for a solution whereby teachers can upload homework, then children can open that document and save the changes at home. Is anyone actually using Sharepoint for this? And how can I cut down on the Newsfeed and Sites for example?

 

Also I've read up that some users have mapped network drives to their Skydrive, but it appears there's a lot of manual configuration going on. Is anyone using Office 365 on this sort of scale?

 

Look forward to your replies

[TheScarfedOne]

Prods for @EduTech and @apearce on this one as using local sharepoint so my experience is limited...

[Michael]

Any feedback on this would be welcome

[SYNACK]

I looked at this kind of thing on the previous iteration and you really need to build it all yourself, there are some pay for templates, a lot of which do not work with 365 and their baseline education templates which have some nice features but are really just a patch indicating that it can be made to work. The new system may be different but I found the previous iteration to be just a free version of the corporate software with no 'education' aspect or thought put in.

 

I did get a little way through making some templates that would do things like this but then time intervened and I needed to do my usual work rather than attempting to build an education focused bit for Office365. I do really hope that this can be addressed and that perhaps a project can be formed to make it a more useful tool in these settings. One that MS could even integrate and offer to schools, like, I hate to say it, GAPS.

[Michael]

@SYNACK from what you're saying not a lot has changed even with the latest Exchange 2013 Office 365, which is quite sad really. I think Microsoft are definitely not making it easy when it comes to using SkyDrive through Office 365. I hope @jamesbmarshall is reading this too as I think there's a lot of potential that could be gained for schools.

[SYNACK]

@SYNACK from what you're saying not a lot has changed even with the latest Exchange 2013 Office 365, which is quite sad really. I think Microsoft are definitely not making it easy when it comes to using SkyDrive through Office 365. I hope @jamesbmarshall is reading this too as I think there's a lot of potential that could be gained for schools.

 

I have not been back to check whether they have got around to our upgrade or not as we were still in testing and not deployed, have not tried the newest incarnation which may be better, hopefully.

[Michael]

This is just it, I don't think the latest Office 365 offers anything new or beneficial when it comes to schools and Skydrive.

[Simcfc73]

Be interesting to see the new version when I get upgraded on the 10th. I really don't like sharepoint for a school, i am sure if you throw hours and hours at it then its fine but I haven't the time. If skydrive in office 365 links on a educaiton network I might look into it... allowing students to upload to their skydrive but I can't see it playing nicely with network drives which is google/dropboxes problem. TBH I am not sire anout the cloud full stop.

[SYNACK]

Yay, MS has finally upgraded our deployment, now, can I remember my password...

[Michael]

Be interesting to see what you make of it Synack! Don't get too excited

[IKWeb]

The new Blue looks is horrid... BRING BACK THE OLD LOOKING SHAREPOINT!!!