Office 365 Education free for students?

[kennysarmy]

IS THIS TRUE:

 

"as long as your school has Office included within your annual licence (which you do under the Desktop option) you can add a product called Student Advantage (Office 365 for your students) free of charge for as long as you are within the scheme"

 

and if it is how do I proceed to get my students setup?

 

Cheers

[FN-GM]

Nearly true, you must have EEES if you have that with office your students get 5 copies each for free via office 365. We do it here!

[Marshall_IT]

You need to contact your EEES reseller and ask for the licenses.

[gshaw]

Yup, as long as you're licensed under EES you can request the additional licenses then activate them against your Office 365 tenancy.

 

I've written down the process from our experiences here Office 365 Student Advantage end-to-end guide | gshaw0

[kennysarmy]

Yup, as long as you're licensed under EES you can request the additional licenses then activate them against your Office 365 tenancy.

 

I've written down the process from our experiences here Office 365 Student Advantage end-to-end guide | gshaw0

 

Just had an email back from Capita..."I have ordered this for you, once completed you will get an e-mail from MS with the next steps"

 

Does anyone know how long this typically takes?

 

Cheers

[JRowley]

Not very long, a few days/a week. It's a relatively simple process, and around Christmas time they will be rolling this out for staff too.

[SteveM555]

We also do this here. The licenses are added when we create new pupil email accounts, the license lasts for 1 year I believe.

 

Just out of interest, how have people gone about assigning licenses to existing users in bulk? - We have had to use Powershell, there must be a better way?

[ellsandell]

We also do this here. The licenses are added when we create new pupil email accounts, the license lasts for 1 year I believe.

 

Just out of interest, how have people gone about assigning licenses to existing users in bulk? - We have had to use Powershell, there must be a better way?

 

Powershell is the only current option that i'm aware of. I know they are changing the way the product works/ can be licensed when they release the Staff licenses in December.

 

New Office 365 ProPlus benefits for students and faculty/staff - Microsoft Education in the Cloud - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/cloud-services/142411-office-365-proplus-free-staff-1st-dec-2014-a.html

[SteveM555]

Powershell is the only current option that i'm aware of. I know they are changing the way the product works/ can be licensed when they release the Staff licenses in December.

 

New Office 365 ProPlus benefits for students and faculty/staff - Microsoft Education in the Cloud - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

 

http://www.edugeek.net/forums/cloud-services/142411-office-365-proplus-free-staff-1st-dec-2014-a.html

 

Thanks for that! Certainly looks like many Schools will benefit from it.

 

I don't mind using the Powershell method to assign licenses, just a bit of a mess about when it should be included in the management tools :-)

[Marshall_IT]

MS products both internal and hosted are relying more and more on the use of powershell.

[kennysarmy]

We also do this here. The licenses are added when we create new pupil email accounts, the license lasts for 1 year I believe.

 

Just out of interest, how have people gone about assigning licenses to existing users in bulk? - We have had to use Powershell, there must be a better way?

 

For our school email we use MDaemon, I'm assuming we'd go down the auto-account creation and auto-licence assignment.....

[kennysarmy]

OK.

 

I've now got my OSA key and I've setup my account and logged in to the Office 365 admin center

 

I've clicked to setup and immediately am presented with this option:

 

Select the domain you want to use for your email addresses. You can continue to use the domain you created when you signed up (SCHOOLNAME.onmicrosoft.com), or you can use your own domain!

 

Not sure of the pros and cons of each?

 

Basically we have office 2010 installed on all the school computers and I just want to supplement this with users being able to use Office 365 on their own devices at home - I'm presuming anything they save using Office 365 can then be emailed in to school and will open fine under our normal Office 2010 installations - and vice versa?

[kennysarmy]

Still not sure what I'm doing but I've mailed RM who host our DNS records to ask them to:

 

Create one of the following records:

 

Record type (choose one) Alias or Hostname Destination or Points to Address TTL

TXT @ or SCHOOL DOMAIN NAME MS=ms3xx67170 1 Hour

MX @ or SCHOOL DOMAIN NAME ms39xx7170.msv1.invalid.outlook.com 1 Hour

 

This is needed apparently to to verify eligibility for Microsoft Office 365 Education!

[JRowley]

Yes, Microsoft will perform a dns lookup for one of those records to confirm that the person they are dealing with has authority over the domain.

[Haptic]

Entitlement is the same for both CASA+EES and OVS-ES on this, commonly known as EEEEEES!

 

I'll drop you a PM with some Cmdlts that should help you out, generally speaking for bulk assign:

 

Get-Msoluser or Msolgroup, where the licence assignment is false and pipe it to assign the MsolAccountSku using the set- cmdlet , don't forget student & faculty licences will need segmenting in this licence assignment

 

feel free to give us a call if you're having any issues - 01536 316 870.

 

Ta,

Mark

[kennysarmy]

Yes, Microsoft will perform a dns lookup for one of those records to confirm that the person they are dealing with has authority over the domain.

 

I have had an email back from RM to confirm they have amended the DNS record to add:

 

schooolname.county.sch.uk. 3600 IN TXT "MS=ms39067170" .

 

this was done apparently on the 30th October @ 4am.

 

When I log on to the office portal to complete adding the domain I get the error:

 

 

Verification DNS record not found

We couldn't verify schooolname.county.sch.uk make sure that the verification DNS record that you created at your domain registrar is correct, and that you've waited at least 72 hours after you added the record.

 

 

Any ideas?

[witch]

Ask them to add the MX record as well? Just in case they have got something wrong somewhere

[Edu-IT]

I have had an email back from RM to confirm they have amended the DNS record to add:

 

schooolname.county.sch.uk. 3600 IN TXT "MS=ms39067170" .

 

this was done apparently on the 30th October @ 4am.

 

When I log on to the office portal to complete adding the domain I get the error:

 

 

Verification DNS record not found

We couldn't verify schooolname.county.sch.uk make sure that the verification DNS record that you created at your domain registrar is correct, and that you've waited at least 72 hours after you added the record.

 

 

Any ideas?

 

You can use KLOTH.NET - NSLOOKUP - DNS Look up - Find IP Address to verify the records exist. The DNS troubleshooter within the Office 365 portal should highlight what is wrong?

[kennysarmy]

You can use KLOTH.NET - NSLOOKUP - DNS Look up - Find IP Address to verify the records exist. The DNS troubleshooter within the Office 365 portal should highlight what is wrong?

 

Thanks - I can see the issue now....