[ms office - 2013] Automatically adding Office365 SharePoint as a place in Office 2013

[Norphy]

We will be pushing out Office 2013 to our users in the new academic and we'll be pushing Office 365 to them as well, specifically OneDrive for Business. To help improve uptake of this, I'd like them to be able to easily save to their OFB account directly from an Office program. You can manually add OFB as an Office 365 SharePoint place but I'd like to be able to automate this if possible, preferably using a GPO but a script if necessary. Can it be done?

[jaminben]

I would also like to know if this is possible?

 

Anyone?

[zag]

I wouldn't bother with onedrive for business personally, its very limited in what it can do.

 

I'm not sure there is a way to do this, (or a lot of other things) with a GPO.

 

We gave up after finding too many limitations.

[Norphy]

Sorry, the question wasn't "Should I bother with OFB?", the question was "How do I automatically link OFB to Office?". I didn't ask for advice on whether it's worth implementing, I asked for advice on automatically linking it to Office. If you don't have anything useful to say on that matter, please don't stick your oar in saying that the whole endeavour is worthless. I don't particularly want your opinion on that. In any case, it's a free 25GB of online storage for our students. It may be feature limited compared to Google Drive, DropBox or whatever but it's free, we have it already, it does what we want from it and it works. Why look at anything else? Why pay for a rival service or go to the trouble of setting up a Google Apps account?

 

Now looking further into it, Office 2013 now seems to be automatically signing people into their MS organisational accounts (I'm guessing enabling federation has done this) and linking to OFB automatically so hopefully this is a moot point.

[burgemaster]

Hi Norphy

 

Could I please ask how you are setup for students to automatically connect to O365?

We have O365 and Office 2013. We have DirSync setup so they login to the network with the same credentials as they would login to O365.

 

I was hoping that they would automatically login to all the Office 2013 packages. But they have to "Add a Place" and log in again!

 

Was there something you did to get this sorted please?

[jaminben]

I would also like to know this... I think you'd (we'd) need ADFS.

[ThomL]

We have an ADFS server paired with a WAP server to federate and supply SSO. In the first instance we deployed office 2013 and experienced lots of issues with trying to achieve what you desire - after some research it was discovered that there is a 365 version of the office suit that needs to be distributed and set up to use a multi-user instance so not to use the users home licenses - the licensing of office sits with the users in this instance not using organisational MAK etc. - with the 365 version of office deployed this way when the user federates through with sso etc. the save areas such as sharepoint sites and the onedrive auto populate to your cloud 365 infrastructure.

 

This should go some way to help: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj219423.aspx

With this explaining the licensing method I mentioned some more: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn782860.aspx

[Norphy]

We use a hosted ADFS service (Federate 365) to authenticate our users with Office 365. Signing into Office and the connection to OneDrive for Business inside office seems to happen by itself. There were no additional configuration steps required for us.

 

IF you don't have ADFS, I don't think it will however.

[TC-1927]

Hi

 

We are also looking at this.

 

From what I have read, in order to achieve the above you'd require a full-fat SSO implemented, which would require ADFS.

 

I started working through this in my test environment, but real life got in the way, and by that time I had sort of decided that AzureADConnectionTool (ie dirsync) would probably suffice for the meantime.

 

If anyone has this working (especially in a Local Authority environment) I'd appreciate any pointers.

[ThomL]

I've only ever seen this done with a federated domain that has sso enabled - implement adfs and you should be sorted!

 

Following the Geek of all trades should go a long way towards you having this working

Edited March 25, 2015 by ThomL

[TC-1927]

I just remembered how far I got with that walk-through:

 

"...Then purchase and install a server-authentication certificate from a public certificate authority. Make sure you match the certificate’s subject name with the Fully Qualified Domain Name of the server. Launch IIS Manager and import that certificate to the default Web site"

 

Purchase a what-from-wherenow?

[burgemaster]

I just remembered how far I got with that walk-through:

 

"...Then purchase and install a server-authentication certificate from a public certificate authority. Make sure you match the certificate’s subject name with the Fully Qualified Domain Name of the server. Launch IIS Manager and import that certificate to the default Web site"

 

Purchase a what-from-wherenow?

 

I would look at an SSL cert from Ja.Net. Your county support should be able to get one for you for around £35 instead of the full £150-£200

[ThomL]

You need a certificate to sign the connection, SSL and all that jazz! so when users try to log into office 365 when you federate your domain microsoft sends that traffic to your adfs server that sits in your domain to keep this secure its best to use a WAP server to handle this (should be in the guide?) but the WAP/ADFS server will need to be published to the internet, publicly accessible so users can still login when no in the domain and to be able to publish and use the service this way you have to keep everything secured and part of this is using a certificate on the FQDN of the server that is published and carrying out the communications.

 

we bought a certificate from godaddy as they aren't a bad price really (im sure you can get cheaper and rather sure if you tried hard enough you could get a free cert that is signed by a third party) once you have bought the cert you import it to the server and then use it to sign the communications, like i said SSL and all that jazz!

 

as an example out WAP server is published publicly as sts.kingsmead-school.com, it is browsable via the internet, anywhere. as the DNS record and setup point to it with the fqdn sts.kingsmead-school.com we bought the cert from go daddy with this domain, imported it to the server and used it to keep everything secure.

 

have i helped at all or am i just confusing things? :/

[TC-1927]

Will bookmark this for the summer. Cheers both!