GAFE and O365 at the same time

[BKGarry]

OK all, I know this can be done in theory, but I was wondering how many of you are physically doing this and can give pointers :-)

 

At the moment we have Office365 for all, it has been running for two years and has everyone using it (although "full fat" outlook as a client for staff can be very flakey I find compared to an onsite exchange server).

 

I have been asked about Google Classroom and all their other tools, which everyone seems to be raving about (I have no doubt they are good and probably easier to use than the M$ tools). It comes down to this, I know we are not using Office365 to its full potential but we want to Offer GAFE but here is the thing with no emails at all at present, but maybe looking at testing one or two later one and see if they perform better (and works with Outlook ok) and if it passes look at migrating over.

 

The big one is to all of you running both at the same time, can you get away without emails on GAFE or is it needed to really complete the package?

 

Also how did you set it up to run both? I have read about GAD (which seems to make sense) but will I have any other issues to really think about?

 

I hope I have made sense and look forward to your responses

[craigw]

Hi there

We do exactly that but arrived at it from the other end.

We have Exchange on prem and implemented GAFE without Gmail. Setup GAD and the accounts sycn each morning. Recently implemented password sync as well and it runs without any issues at all. Students and teachers make good use of GAFE and I have not seen any issues where not having a gmail account has limited the use of GAFE.(Would be keen to hear if anyone has another view).

 

We have just implement Office 365 but for the moment are keeping Exchange on prem. Given the way we work (multi user desktops - not one to one laptops), the number of admin users etc who manage multiple mailboxes, and the familiarity with Outlook - I cannot find a business case to A) move to Gmail B) move Exchange to the cloud. The 1 reason I keep revisiting it though is the incredible amount of storage for email that I can't compete with on prem - but other than that I don't see a business case.

So just this week we have AAD Sync and password sync now running for Office 365 as well which will mean the kids and staff get OneDrive - Office Web Apps - Writes Access to the iPad Office apps and most importantly Student Advantage for free (as we are licenced for Office via EES) which means they can download and install Office on up to 5 machines.

 

Cheers

Wally

[BKGarry]

Thank you @craigw

 

What I would say is you could move your students mailboxes to 365 and keep the onsite exchange server for staff, I have read documentation about doing that, which could free up space on your exchange server for your staff to utilise :-)

[LukeC]

I have been running office 365 for staff and students for about a year now. We have recently implemented gafe (3 months) with out gmail. Works okay but if you want to use groups in classroom you need the mail side from what I can see. Gads and gaps both running to sync only users and passwords.

[ZeroHour]

You could emulate this a little by creating an account linked to a 3rd party mail service like hotmail. Google hides the option (or it did) but its possible to sign up using an existing email address which means you dont have gmail as such and you can have a play/test with staff.

[BKGarry]

Ok, I think I have it working, I have email disabled and I have put in GADS (which has synchronised all users) and I have changed my "normal" staff account password and that seemed to have synced up fine.

 

Now silly questions, is there a main "launchpad" where people can log in and choose the app they want, or do they need to go to each separate app address? Also I cannot seem to get my head around the defining students from teachers, am I meant to sync the AD groups there with their email address and the OUs do not seems to have synced with the Google Org Unit I asked it to do (unless I have to create each on of those manually before it goes into them)

[craigw]

@BKGarry Have you managed to get your OU's syncing? Using GADS and selecting the org units under the general settings on the main page - and all our org units synced up accordingly - no need to create anything manually.

With the launch pad you talk of - not really - but if the users sign into drive or any google app - then up in the right hand corner are 9 little squares - click on that and it drops down the box to pick from all the other apps..

we just find that as users do not have gmail - the most common link they use is drive.google.com as their starting point.

[BKGarry]

I did get the OUs syncing in the end, was actually the fact I didn't set them up in GAFE first so it didn't make them. And thanks for pointing me at the GAFE version of AppLauncher :-)