Office 365 - How far have you gone and what is your setup

[Satvir]

Hi,

 

We are an independent school looking at Office 365 or Google Docs.

 

My preference would be Office365, since staff and students use Office 2013 anyway. I am ideally looking at a prospective from a private school, but open to ideas from other large schools or Academies who have carried out a full roll out.

 

Each user has an email account that they access via OWA. We have 5 iPad trollies and a laptop trolley as well. Users save to their home drives.

 

How does your school manage Office 365 and staff/students saving to the cloud? Do you sync your home drives to the OneDrive cloud? Does it affect bandwidth with lots of users attempting to save at the same time? Do you give them freedom to save their files to their home drives and their OneDrive area and it is up to them how they manage their areas? What do you do if your Internet goes down - are you pretty much stuffed?

 

It would be good if there was a chance that I could visit a site close to Leicester to see it in action and how you manage it.

 

Thanks in advance for your help.

[gshaw]

All staff (1000 mailboxes) on Office 365 for email using Outlook desktop client

All students provisioned (10000) and Student Advantage enabled

Staff Intranet on SharePoint being launched in a couple of weeks

All users synced from AD using Azure DirSync

 

OneDrive not being used much at the moment, mainly down to how poorly the desktop client is implemented within Windows (60 / 120GB SSDs with fully synced OneDrive libraries is asking for trouble). Until MS sort that out with either Windows 10 or Office 2015 we're not going to be pushing it that much. It's better on BYOD devices but students are mainly still using networked PCs as it stands.