Governors on Office 365

[Cache]

After launching Office 365 in the Summer and gradually spending time with a few people showing them the advantages of a Global Address Book, Calendar, Task List, things are really starting to take off. So much so that now I've been asked to try and setup a calendar and tasks list for governors.

 

At the same time I mentioned possibly using the Sharepoint aspect of it for Document Libraries, calendars and task lists and the idea of that went down a storm. Now I'm left with working out how best to achieve it.

 

2 questions are floating around in my head that I could do with the answer to:

 

1. Am I ok to licence Governors on Office 365?

2. Is there anyway to synchronise a folder from our Staff Shared drive to a folder on Office 365? - This would probably be the policies folder which I would like to synchronise, however I'm not ready to launch the Sharepoint aspect to staff yet.

 

Thanks for any help / advice!

[jamesbmarshall]

1. Am I ok to licence Governors on Office 365?

 

Yes.

 

2. Is there anyway to synchronise a folder from our Staff Shared drive to a folder on Office 365? - This would probably be the policies folder which I would like to synchronise, however I'm not ready to launch the Sharepoint aspect to staff yet.

 

Hmm.. possibly. It's not really how it's designed to work. You can move the folder to SharePoint Online and users can sync it to their PC and access it via a browser, etc. but SharePoint Online isn't necessarily designed with this scenario in mind.

[funkyfin2000]

We are shortly bringing on Governors with a number of our schools. This will be done through RM Unify and then passed into Office 365. They will then get access to a SharePoint site that will be set up for them with Governors sitting in their own security group they can only access the data they require.

 

Hope that makes sense. I wouldn't do the staff drive sync personally - just store it in Doc Libs etc but you may need wait before you want to launch to Staff etc. Or maybe use the Governors as a test bed?

 

Rich

[Cache]

Thanks @jamesbmarshall, just what I was hoping for the 1st part.

 

Thats what we are hoping to do too @funkyfin2000, although minus the RM Unify bit and just go with Cloud ID's. I'm not ready to launch sharepoint with staff, I'm still very much learning about it and so the governors are almost certainly going to be the test bed for it. Maybe I'll just stick a big notice on it that changes must be emailed to an email address for inclusion on the school network also and get around it that way.

 

Thanks again for the replies both, now just to workout how to use Sharepoint properly....

[funkyfin2000]

Sounds good @Cache. Let us know how you get on. We have a lot of experience in SharePoint and in it's raw state can still be quite a beast to work with. We have purchased RM's Site Creator tool which effectively builds all your SharePoint structure for you through a simple wizard. You can then use that tool to go back and add content to your Sharepoint sites. Pretty nifty and worth a look to see if it could be any benefit to you. My honest opnion otherwise is you will waste a lot of time designing sites in SharePoint to be useful to users.