O365 Student ProPlus

[chazzy2501]

I've enabled this for all my Pupils and a letter has gone out to parents. I was wondering how successful it was? How can I see how many pupils have logged in and downloaded the software. I've only made proplus available.

[zag]

Most students won't care about office, but I would imagine using it on the ipads will be popular.

[chazzy2501]

oh, well. I didn't enable one drive so no ipad office

[bondbill2k2]

Same situation here enabled for all students but we haven't enabled onedrive due to the newsfeed requirements. Tryed out the app on some test accounts and it seems pretty decent I'm sure staff would love it

[jamesbmarshall]

Same situation here enabled for all students but we haven't enabled onedrive due to the newsfeed requirements. Tryed out the app on some test accounts and it seems pretty decent I'm sure staff would love it

 

I'm just going to come out and ask it... what's wrong with the Newsfeed?

[bondbill2k2]

I'm just going to come out and ask it... what's wrong with the Newsfeed?

 

We don't want students posting on each other's feed using it as a social network

[jamesbmarshall]

We don't want students posting on each other's feed using it as a social network

 

Why not?

[bondbill2k2]

Why not?

Because I can guaranteed it would be misused, far as I'm aware there's no good way to monitor its use either.

[jamesbmarshall]

Because I can guaranteed it would be misused

 

Believe it or not, I knew you'd say that.

 

Truth is, there's a lot of stuff in school that has the potential for abuse but that doesn't mean that everything gets locked down, switched off, hidden away. You're absolutely right, some kids would probably abuse it initially but that's what sanctions are for. If you never turn it on, you're preventing everyone from ever benefitting from it (that is the whole of SharePoint, rather than just the Newsfeed element).

 

After all, wouldn't you want your students to get their 1TB of storage? Or the Office Online apps?

 

Surely it's a fantastic opportunity to work with teachers on educating students about online etiquette?

[bondbill2k2]

Try getting that past SLT

[jamesbmarshall]

I hear that a lot, too. What are their specific objections?

 

Anything that can have a positive impact on pupil outcomes, albeit indirectly, should get some serious consideration from them rather than being dismissed under the banner of "might get abused". If they're serious about trying to improve access to content, technology, etc. anywhere, anytime, then they should have some pretty solid reasoning behind choosing not to go for it.

[chazzy2501]

For me, activating Onedrive means turning on SharePoint. I'm not ready to manage SharePoint or have the resources to monitor it and a newsfeed (which I'd not even considered until now)

 

I do look forward to using it though, the multi author editing in Word online is a hoot. (word proper less so)

 

I'll give management a demo and see what they say..

[bondbill2k2]

For me, activating Onedrive means turning on SharePoint. I'm not ready to manage SharePoint or have the resources to monitor it and a newsfeed (which I'd not even considered until now)

 

I do look forward to using it though, the multi author editing in Word online is a hoot. (word proper less so)

 

I'll give management a demo and see what they say..

 

We allocate slt test accounts with it all active on. You could just restrict the root site collection to relieve the need to manage sharepoint sites or give everything everyone just read access and put a couple of useful links on a single index page. In a few minutes you could make a staff, slt and students subsite, put some nice icons on the root site to each, give teachers modify permissions to the student area and let them have a little freedom to experiment, just make sure they know it might be removed depending on the sharepoint plans.

 

We first started testing it with staff by using little features like a staff shared calendar, then we introduced department calenders, then a blog which a select group of students could contribute on.

Edited May 7, 2014 by bondbill2k2

[Jasbo]

My feedback - if you are asking - would be less to do with the ability to abuse it but more a case of feeling the skydrive and in turn newsfeed as available in office 365 just seems very clunky.

 

Coming from live@edu with skydrive consumer accounts for all users we really pushed students and staff into the idea of cloud storage replacing pen drives etc, this was adopted well and as such we got excited about skydrive pro on 365 as the next logical step.

 

Here we are perhaps still a little old school in that I have a domain and predominantly win 7 desktops and I still map user drives and storage, I run locked down machines with small hds and I redirect everything and the kitchen sink from user profiles to servers.

 

What I really want is and what all my users want is to make a users skydrive pro folder appear on the machines like a folder/WebDAV folder and that this can be automated and or scripted or have an application from ms that manages this as a service, I know you have said this is not exactly how it's supposed to be used, but I'm struggling with what exactly I am supposed to be doing with skydrive pro In this ad/desktop/profile situation, which I believe to be how many schools running ad still do things?

 

I can appreciate that with mobile devices on 1 to 1 and byod options etc that schools are moving to this would be less of an issue, as yes I think the skydrive pro app is very good, especially on tablets as an app to "send to" or "open with" from other apps to upload work to a users storage, but I feel that these new mobile resources are not going to be replacing our desktops any time soon and actually make the need for easy access to skydrive pro from desktops really important to enable workflow for our users who are using tablets etc as well.

 

Sync/skydrive app on desktops is not workable ( when it does work) given how we do things, skydrive pro integration into office apps is a nice feature but no good for all our school apps, open in explorer view and drag and drop are proving to be frustrating for our end users in practice and the GUI for skydrive pro on sharepoint is a bleak prospect compared against the skydrive consumer web GUI

 

We currently have skydrive /newsfeed disabled, it made my IT director cry when I had to shatter his cloud first vision - I hold Microsoft 100% responsible for making a grown man sob btw but I am still struggling with how skydrive pro can be used effectively here while we are still a mainly bog standard windows desktop setup and believe me I really want that 1tb per user!!

 

Please substitute skydrive for onedrive in all of the above

 

My 2 cents etc

[Jasbo]

Okay I may have gone a bit of topic there with a one drive rant fest, sorry...

[apearce]

For me, activating Onedrive means turning on SharePoint. I'm not ready to manage SharePoint or have the resources to monitor it and a newsfeed (which I'd not even considered until now)

 

I do look forward to using it though, the multi author editing in Word online is a hoot. (word proper less so)

 

I'll give management a demo and see what they say..

 

IF you do give them a license for SharePoint they don't get access to anything other than OneDrive and the newsfeeds. you wont have to manage/monitor anything. By default, a user has to be given access to a SharePoint sitecollection so you wont need to monitor it or do anything.

[bondbill2k2]

Just wondering @Jasbo have you updated to office 2013 yet? 2013 + ADFS works great, automatically picks up on the user and allows them to directly open/save to their Onedrive account. The only annoying thing is the option saying Onedrive is actually the consumer version not the business model, the option named up as your domain will be their Onedrive business account. You can lockdown this to only your domain accounts and prevent users logging into their personal onedrive.

 

Office webapps have greatly improved recently to but are still limited compared to the full fledged Office suite, the ProPlus provides students with the great benefit of 5 full Office 2013 installs per student and the ability to deactivate these via the web interface if they upgrade their equipment.... the app's aren't bad either. Might look at the use of chromebooks with Google Apps, cheap simply easily managed laptops with the ability to do the same as our current aging laptops are used for 95% of the time.

Edited May 7, 2014 by bondbill2k2

[Jasbo]

Hi.

 

We are looking to go to 2013 this year and agree that the integration with onedrive In that is good, but I don't use adfs presently only azure ad sync/pwd sync.

 

My understanding is if my adfs setup was not available then a user would not be able to logon to 365, I couldn't really get my head around why anyone would want to be In that boat, that currently my email would still work in the event of a nuclear strike on my school seems a good thing?

 

That and the 4 server setup guide I read from ms made me think it was a bit OTT for a secondary school, that was a year ago tho. Perhaps I need to go and have another look then.

[bondbill2k2]

Hi.

 

We are looking to go to 2013 this year and agree that the integration with onedrive In that is good, but I don't use adfs presently only azure ad sync/pwd sync.

 

My understanding is if my adfs setup was not available then a user would not be able to logon to 365, I couldn't really get my head around why anyone would want to be In that boat, that currently my email would still work in the event of a nuclear strike on my school seems a good thing?

 

That and the 4 server setup guide I read from ms made me think it was a bit OTT for a secondary school, that was a year ago tho. Perhaps I need to go and have another look then.

 

 

Yes the setup is a pain and ott with on site server requirements, we have mentioned the idea of this with replication in azure but not looked that much into it yet.

[jamesbmarshall]

In that is good, but I don't use adfs presently only azure ad sync/pwd sync.

 

My understanding is if my adfs setup was not available then a user would not be able to logon to 365, I couldn't really get my head around why anyone would want to be In that boat, that currently my email would still work in the event of a nuclear strike on my school seems a good thing?

 

That and the 4 server setup guide I read from ms made me think it was a bit OTT for a secondary school, that was a year ago tho. Perhaps I need to go and have another look then.

 

Yes the setup is a pain and ott with on site server requirements, we have mentioned the idea of this with replication in azure but not looked that much into it yet.

 

I've written about this (Deploying Office 365 Education? You don't need single sign-on, and here's why!). ADFS is a big undertaking, and won't necessarily give you much more than what you have now with password sync with respect to the end-user experience.

 

ADFS does have benefits, but there will always be a requirement to have ADFS servers available, whether hosted on-premises or using IaaS in something like Azure as Azure AD will look to your ADFS servers for authN. If the ADFS servers (or DCs) are down then there's no access to Office 365, OR Azure AD and any other associated services.

 

Using ADFS (or not) shouldn't impact your ability to use OneDrive for Business at all.

 

It's better these days to think about your local AD's relationship with Azure AD, rather than specifically Office 365 Education. It's possible to use Azure AD to authenticate to lots of services, of which Office 365 is just one.

[Cache]

It's better these days to think about your local AD's relationship with Azure AD, rather than specifically Office 365 Education. It's possible to use Azure AD to authenticate to lots of services, of which Office 365 is just one.

 

I've looked at some possibilities with this, but not found a specific answer to this question:

 

To use Azure AD to authenticate another service along with Password Sync from existing AD, do you need to pay for Azure AD to accomodate this?

[EduTech]

I've looked at some possibilities with this, but not found a specific answer to this question:

 

To use Azure AD to authenticate another service along with Password Sync from existing AD, do you need to pay for Azure AD to accomodate this?

 

Hi,

 

In respect to Windows Azure Active Directory (WAAD) you have two options [Free & Premium] and the differences in these are mentioned in the following article: Pricing Details - Active Directory | Microsoft Azure

 

If you wish to use WAAD as your Identity Provider for Software as a Service (SaaS) Applications then you can achieve this with the FREE version of WAAD, with up to 10 Applications (p/user).

 

I hope that helps,

 

James.

[Cache]

Hi,

 

In respect to Windows Azure Active Directory (WAAD) you have two options [Free & Premium] and the differences in these are mentioned in the following article: Pricing Details - Active Directory | Microsoft Azure

 

If you wish to use WAAD as your Identity Provider for Software as a Service (SaaS) Applications then you can achieve this with the FREE version of WAAD, with up to 10 Applications (p/user).

 

I hope that helps,

 

James.

 

Interesting, that's a page I couldn't find for some reason.

 

So..... if I wanted to do something like this: Tutorial: Azure AD integration with Google Apps that would be possible using the Free version of Azure AD?

[EduTech]

Interesting, that's a page I couldn't find for some reason.

 

So..... if I wanted to do something like this: Tutorial: Azure AD integration with Google Apps that would be possible using the Free version of Azure AD?

 

Correct.

 

It's not un-common for people to use WAAD as the Identity Provider for Google Apps... :-)

 

James.

[Cache]

That puts a different spin on things for me, thanks James!