Skydrive Pro Vs Dropbox article - relevent to .edu? And other Office 365 Q's

[RabbieBurns]

SkyDrive Pro vs Dropbox - And Why is it Better? | Sharegate's Blog

 

Is this article relevant to education?

 

We have just been upgraded to office 365 and have spend way more man-hours than we can afford on trying to get to a working solution regarding ADFS, and now find they release a new version of DIRSYNC which makes all our previous work obsolete.

 

Anyway, I digress - what the last paragraph meant to say was we have not really had the opportunity to discover the advantages office 365 will bring us.

 

We are are^^^ were heavily invested in Skydrive. We also have EES Enterprise Assurance licensing for Microsoft. From my initial reading office 365 has a licening model where we pay per student. At a school with EES, where we pay by FTE of about 130, and a student base of over 1500; paying for something on a per student basis is going to result in a massive increase in licencing costs

 

My main gripe with office 365 vs live@edu is that MS were so helpful and communicative with assisting us with live@edu, and now that we were locked in this support has completely disappeared for us here in .au and left us stumbling.

 

If it wasnt for this site and @jamesbmarshall we would be 100% completely lost. Every time we had a question regarding office 365 and asked their support, they just directed us to their support webpages. These pages actually go round and round in circles.

 

anyway this has changed from a legitimate question into a rant, please excuse the latter.

[Sylv3r]

We have an issue at the minute with Office365 and IMAP. Our iPADs were playing nicely up until this week and now they fail to connect with password is incorrect, although we can access the accounts fine using the same password via the web.

 

We've had many a discussion with the support team over many an hour over the last couple of days and we don't seem to be getting any further forward - the two people we have spoken to both yesterday and today have wanted us to go through exactly the same steps.

 

Hopefully, the fault has now been escalated and we will get a resolution ASAP. I was keen to migrate all staff from our existing Mail System to Office365 over the summer, but I now feel that it is too big a risk to take especially as the support we have received has not been what I would expect from a company such as Microsoft as this is not just the last couple of days but the last 2 or 3 times also we have asked for their help.

 

We were quite happy with the Live@Edu system and it just worked for us students, since moving to Office365 we have had no end of issues - the admin interface appears to be extremely buggy and is not particularly intuitive plus a lot of the documentation and helpguides available still don't appear to have been upgraded from the previous Live@Edu docs.

 

Apologies - that I have taken the OP off topic.

[kevin_lane]

Well you guys have answered my question as I was thinking of maybe I should take the school down this route but now maybe not I mean office

365 does sound gud but im a bit well..not old fashioned as im 28 but I like the sense of im in control of the flow of whats going on in my network and for something this important I dont thing people should take the risk even if it's "new tech" their are other ways to provide access to these programs people just. Have to way up the pros and cons like everything else

[dhicks]

We have just been upgraded to office 365 and have spend way more man-hours than we can afford on trying to get to a working solution regarding ADFS, and now find they release a new version of DIRSYNC which makes all our previous work obsolete.

 

If it's any help (to either you or anyone else reading this), DropBox's client seems to work very well on Linux - I have a virtual machine that runs the DropBox client to sync DropBox folders which are then shared out to specific users via Samba. I'm not quite sure how well it would scale to an entire school's worth of accounts as you seem to have to run a separate DropBox instance for each user, so it gets rather memory heavy, but it's working well so far.