Office 365 Exchange Online now 50GB Mailbox per user!

[jamesbmarshall]

Cheers - its because I have to show all my new students email and I can see the confusion in their faces already when they login a week later to discover its not the same!

 

I hear this a lot, but I don't think it needs to be as bad as people think.

 

For example, you could welcome everyone back to school (or just "to school" for new starters ) with an email saying that in 'x' amount of time they'll see some big improvements coming to their inbox, and then provide them with some links to find out more, such as some of the resources here: Resources for Users and Power Users - Upgrade to Office 365 - Office 365 - Microsoft Office 365 Community, like: What's new in Outlook Web App - support - Office.com.

 

Change doesn't have to be confusing, and I know first-hand that people don't read so you can't guarantee the effectiveness of the email campaign but it is a start.

 

Why not sign-up for a second environment that you can use to make some screencasts or blog posts or other internal comms walking through the latest changes in the context of your school?

 

Hold a competition for your students to submit their best top tips for the new update?

 

I'm just throwing a couple of ideas out there, not saying they're good. But hopefully you can see there are ways to make a transition easier.

 

How do other schools manage change with their users? What campaigns do they run? I'd love to know of any really successful stories, maybe they can be re-told on our blog!

[the_dude]

Cheers - its because I have to show all my new students email and I can see the confusion in their faces already when they login a week later to discover its not the same!

 

your students will have no trouble adjusting...it's the staff that will have issues. =)

[nadeem]

At my place I have students from 18-80!

 

My staff aren't on O365

[sukh]

Depending on your reason to speed the upgrade it may be possible but the reason must be good.

[techie08]

This is the sort of self-centred approach that causes entire school ICT systems to be outsourced.

 

Why is it self centred and why would it cause Entire ICT systems to be outsourced?

[CyberNerd]

Why is it self centred and why would it cause Entire ICT systems to be outsourced?

 

The post showed (tongue in cheek, I hope) that s/he wanted to use a particular system - not because of any benefit to the school, but so s/he could learn to use it in order to move on to a job in industry. IMO this is self centered and detrimental to the school. Anyone who is going to choose X over Y because it will help them get a job somewhere else doesn't deserve to be an educationalist.

Any head teacher or governing body who was being dictated to by a technician should have them sacked. Outsourcing is a pretty efficient way of sacking someone in a restructure, so it's the most common method.

[SYNACK]

This is the sort of self-centred approach that causes entire school ICT systems to be outsourced.

 

As long as you are not holding back the school with it and have other actual decent reasons it is not bad. Even our shiny new 100mbit fibre seems to max out at about 1mbit to the MS servers thanks to NZ's pathetic backbone and international links, let's house all our email off site on that... no thanks. Our 'highly trained' teachers still insist on emailing each other multi megabyte files to each other despite better options, sending that offsite then back again over our link would be madness in the highest degree. It does not help that MS does not dedicate much of anything to NZ so short of a new ceo that can see outside the borders of the usa local services may always be better just because they don't rely so heavily on our (lacking) version of the internet. Edit... we actually agree as you clarified above

Edited September 12, 2013 by SYNACK

[CyberNerd]

I guess that's not so much a problem in the developed world, but I kind of get it that you like being stuck in 1990's ecosystems.

[jamesbmarshall]

Depending on your reason to speed the upgrade it may be possible but the reason must be good.

 

Sorry @sukh but the upgrades can't be pulled forward.

[SYNACK]

I guess that's not so much a problem in the developed world, but I kind of get it that you like being stuck in 1990's ecosystems.

 

Because a local Exchange Server is soooooooo different from a hosted one, they are pretty much the same only the location, speed and oversight are really different.

Edited September 12, 2013 by SYNACK

[sukh]

Sorry @sukh but the upgrades can't be pulled forward.

 

 

Has to be a critical business reason and even then it may still take time, several weeks. The percentage of this getting through is low but IF there is a critical reason and you can justify/prove this, then you may succeed. But I don't see a reason here?

[ZeroHour]

I guess that's not so much a problem in the developed world, but I kind of get it that you like being stuck in 1990's ecosystems.

 

Surely thinking of local exchange as 1990's is pretty backwards and actually could mean you fall fowl of your own outsourcing (but insourcing I guess) argument when you fail to realise having exchange in-house doesn't mean they are 1990's, they just have a need which you dont. Cloud is good for some and not for others and neither is massively better then the other, its all about your schools needs and nothing else. Some people like cloud some dont but I doubt any of us would lose our job to prevent x or y. Having staff issues where they send large attachments regularly to all staff is a valid negative for externally hosted mail, its not impossible to get staff retrained (or outsourced/replaced? if IT can be dismissed so easily why cant teachers when they refuse to use x or y, you would have no more attachment issues ) to use shares etc but each school could have valid reasons for not making mail attachments training priority especially if everything works well in-house and fast. This is even more true if you use roaming profiles and outlook as cache mode is not really an option or use any of exchanges more advanced features.

Edited September 17, 2013 by ZeroHour

[CyberNerd]

Surely thinking of local exchange as 1990's is pretty backwards and actually could mean you fall fowl of your own outsourcing (but insourcing I guess) argument when you fail to realise having exchange in-house doesn't mean they are 1990's, they just have a need which you dont. Cloud is good for some and not for others and neither is massively better then the other, its all about your schools needs and nothing else. Some people like cloud some dont but I doubt any of us would lose our job to prevent x or y. Having staff issues where they send large attachments regularly to all staff is a valid negative for externally hosted mail, its not impossible to get staff retrained (or outsourced/replaced? if IT can be dismissed so easily why cant teachers when they refuse to use x or y, you would have no more attachment issues ) to use shares etc but each school could have valid reasons for not making mail attachments training priority especially if everything works well in-house and fast. This is even more true if you use roaming profiles and outlook as cache mode is not really an option or use any of exchanges more advanced features.

 

We send *masses* of attachments, the difference is they are generally created in the cloud and read in the cloud thus require less bandwidth to transfer offsite than a traditional site-hostedmail server.We have over 1100 devices on site and rarely top 30Mb/s because our cloud solution (google apps) is essentially working online, and even offline doesn't seem to consume much bandwidth. Since we moved to GAPPS (three years ago) our regular bandwidth use has only gone up by 30% yet our device base has gone up over 60%. It's more efficient than sending multiple revisions of word documents and publisher files.

[SYNACK]

We send *masses* of attachments, the difference is they are generally created in the cloud and read in the cloud thus require less bandwidth to transfer offsite than a traditional site-hostedmail server.We have over 1100 devices on site and rarely top 30Mb/s because our cloud solution (google apps) is essentially working online, and even offline doesn't seem to consume much bandwidth. Since we moved to GAPPS (three years ago) our regular bandwidth use has only gone up by 30% yet our device base has gone up over 60%. It's more efficient than sending multiple revisions of word documents and publisher files.

 

There's the ad break I was waiting for, tell us how your way is the best and only way, I'm sure we all want to hear it again.

[CyberNerd]

I was promoting Cloud services over locally hosted. Including Office 365. The reference to GAPPS was simply because you can't get the collaborative features on Office 365 without getting the expensive A2 version - so we don't use that.

 

Over the last 10-15 yrs I've been responsible for multiple hosted mail and document services including Sendmail,Zimbra, Exchange 5.5,2000, 2003,2007 and I can confidently say that a cloud solution (including Office 365) is much easier to manage, is cheaper, has less downtime and is likely more secure than any of the above.

 

I appreciate that most here won't pay for the extra features of Office 365 which brings it near to the level of Google Apps so I apologise for even mentioning it.

[zag]

Over the last 10-15 yrs I've been responsible for multiple hosted mail and document services including Sendmail,Zimbra, Exchange 5.5,2000, 2003,2007 and I can confidently say that a cloud solution (including Office 365) is much easier to manage, is cheaper, has less downtime and is likely more secure than any of the above.

 

+1 on that sir!

 

I think the proof is in the usage. I could never imagine going back to a local exchange server. All the fun with extending the storage, relaying, mail connectors, millions of options, upgrades, downtime, server problems ect... is a thing of the past thankfully

[ZeroHour]

I think the proof is in the usage. I could never imagine going back to a local exchange server. All the fun with extending the storage, relaying, mail connectors, millions of options, upgrades, downtime, server problems ect... is a thing of the past thankfully

In all honesty that stuff is pretty easy for me so it was never an issue hehe.

[the_dude]

I was promoting Cloud services over locally hosted. Including Office 365. The reference to GAPPS was simply because you can't get the collaborative features on Office 365 without getting the expensive A2 version - so we don't use that.

 

A2 is free, maybe you mean A3? As far as I know, all the collaborative features are included in the A2 plan for free.

[john]

In all honesty that stuff is pretty easy for me so it was never an issue hehe.

 

Snap I never had any bother either glad to find others that report good things!

[CyberNerd]

A2 is free, maybe you mean A3? As far as I know, all the collaborative features are included in the A2 plan for free.

 

Yes that was a typo - I meant the A3 plan.

They missed out a load of stuff from the free plan with collaboration - to get the most out of it you need to use a local install of office and link with sharepoint to have multiple author editing and you can't do that on A2. That was *the* thing that teachers wanted when polled. hence we gave up on MSOffice.

[Mayki5]

Yes that was a typo - I meant the A3 plan.

They missed out a load of stuff from the free plan with collaboration - to get the most out of it you need to use a local install of office and link with sharepoint to have multiple author editing and you can't do that on A2. That was *the* thing that teachers wanted when polled. hence we gave up on MSOffice.

 

Quick question on this, what exactly are the collaborative features unavailable on the A3 plan? We're running A2, but with the Office connector tool availble from everybody's dashboard, we've connected our existing Office 2010 installs to Sharepoint. Granted, we are still pre-service upgrade, but we do appear to have the full capability of Sharepoint 2010 as far as workflows and version controls. For those without a local install, the Web apps are at least enough to edit the documents on the fly.

[CyberNerd]

Quick question on this, what exactly are the collaborative features unavailable on the A3 plan? We're running A2, but with the Office connector tool availble from everybody's dashboard, we've connected our existing Office 2010 installs to Sharepoint. Granted, we are still pre-service upgrade, but we do appear to have the full capability of Sharepoint 2010 as far as workflows and version controls. For those without a local install, the Web apps are at least enough to edit the documents on the fly.

 

So to get your students all working on a collaborative document they all need office installed and have to have an office license. 9/10 of our students don't have a copy (and 99% don't have a legitimate copy) so to get them to be able to collaborate we need to buy them one or they are stuck on the cut down web apps. This limitation isn't present in google.

[SYNACK]

So to get your students all working on a collaborative document they all need office installed and have to have an office license. 9/10 of our students don't have a copy (and 99% don't have a legitimate copy) so to get them to be able to collaborate we need to buy them one or they are stuck on the cut down web apps. This limitation isn't present in google.

 

The new version has apparently fixed that in everything but word or so I was told today and they have a 90 day release cycle for more improvements, apparently they are working on word.

[CyberNerd]

The new version has apparently fixed that in everything but word or so I was told today and they have a 90 day release cycle for more improvements, apparently they are working on word.

 

That's much better then. 5yrs after Google did it but better.

[Mayki5]

So to get your students all working on a collaborative document they all need office installed and have to have an office license. 9/10 of our students don't have a copy (and 99% don't have a legitimate copy) so to get them to be able to collaborate we need to buy them one or they are stuck on the cut down web apps. This limitation isn't present in google.

 

Certainly that could be quite the limitation, but it's not a situation we face, since we only have the Staff on the system at present, since we're at Primary level. Office 365 was the option we felt was better for us, with tighter intergration with our existing Office licence and straight upgrade from Live@Edu. But fair enough, we're operating with different environments and requirements.