Experiences with Office 365, Azure and using Cloud

[MrWu]

Hi all

 

Thought I will create a new thread (as a spin off from Azure threads)

 

My Bursar is planning to go cloud long term, for the following reasons:

 

1) disaster recovery

2) Student and staff ease of access anywhere

3) less hardware maintenance and purchase

4) less power consumption

 

Doing the research, I am looking at solutions such as taking

 

1) student/staff to Office 365 (replace our in house Exchange 2010)

2) mapped OneDrive(to reduce file server capacity)

3) using Sharepoint online (to replace our Frog VLE)

4) using SIMS online (to replace our in house SIMS)

5) using Azure site recovery for certain critical servers (so second server room not necessary) and scope for AD still functioning if the main server room is unavailable or destroyed

 

With schools that have Office 365 and OneDrive in place, what are your day to day experiences? I'm looking at this mainly in terms of Internet bandwidth, we have BYOD devices (UniFi) and 100mb fibre line with 1:1 contention

 

1) any performance issues?

2) any recommended firewall and routers to handle increases in Internet traffic (we use a Sonicwall e5500)

3) how do you plan for Internet downtine (ie the mainline going down, or hardware failure?)

 

Thanks as always!

[ellsandell]

We use O365 for staff and students - can't beat it really. Particularly if you want to use Outlook. Constantly updated and with free extras like Student advantage - it makes it even more inviting. Staff and students do like it - don't have any bandwidth problems on a 100Mb line.

 

Currently there is no way of mapping OneDrive for Business (SharePoint Workspace) like you would a home drive (there is a few really hacky ways/scripts however my experiences weren't great with them) and the object limits, it really wouldn't work for most in its current state. Hopefully that might change mind.

 

Using Sharepoint as a VLE is enterierly possible, although we use Moodle and are planning to use the O365 integration (here). O365 Video Services might also be of use for hosting video resources online but not publicly.

 

A few things to note:

1. If you are used to Exchange onsite - you will likely have to look at ADFS to handle your Single Sign on to O365, which requires a minimum of 3 servers (recommended 5?) to handle the ADFS service. I think this is probably a must if you use Sharepoint Online as a VLE.

2. We use Dirsync (Same Sign on) which means users have to logon each time albiet with their network credentials.

[eejit]

Just a basic question guys - when you sign up to Office 365 do you still get a KMS key for Office?

I know that you can log onto office.com with your account and install from there - it looks like app-v behind the scenes. That is no good for a school wide deployment of course, so I'm just wondering how that is supposed to be done?

Thanks.

[lyricalway]

When you download the desktop version, what you get is a time limited licence, which can be re-downloaded providing you still have a qualifying email address. So, not really useful for in-school installs.

[Boredguy]

365 ProPlus is reliant on the school still having a valid volume license for Office for your establishment and mainly for users to install on their own devices (since you would already have Office 2013 installed on your own devices)

[eejit]

So you DO still get a normal Office 2013 download and a KMS key?

Thanks.

[Boredguy]

No as they are 2 different products.

 

As a establishment you have your current Office product licence, either via Select or EES licensing which you have a MAK or KMS key for.

 

Because you have this licence agreement, you can provide Office 365 ProPlus to staff and students for their personal use for free until such time as they leave your establishment.

 

View the proplus provision purely for you users using on their personal devices, and nothing to do with your establishments equipment.

 

The ProPlus installs uses the users e-mail address to validate the licence and not a key code.

[eejit]

Ah, got you - that makes sense.

Thanks!

[rob101]

We use O365 for staff and students - can't beat it really. Particularly if you want to use Outlook. Constantly updated and with free extras like Student advantage - it makes it even more inviting. Staff and students do like it - don't have any bandwidth problems on a 100Mb line.

 

Currently there is no way of mapping OneDrive for Business (SharePoint Workspace) like you would a home drive (there is a few really hacky ways/scripts however my experiences weren't great with them) and the object limits, it really wouldn't work for most in its current state. Hopefully that might change mind.

 

We are doing this right now using a product called Cloud drive mapper from I am cloud, we migrated all local student data to one drives in the last half term and are now mapping it for students, its not perfect yet but it has great potential, i have come across a number of problems which I'm working though at the moment but its nearly good to go.

 

Few things, we are on a 100/100 line which is upgrading to 200/1000 in the summer, the speed of access to Onedrive is a little up and down the limit seems to be Microsoft's end rather than our connection and i have raised this with them twice now and is a known problem, on the flip side the speed each user gets is more equal so no one uses all the bandwidth.

 

ADFS would be nice but its very expensive, I am cloud offer this and the cloud drive mapper together but it was a lot of money to basically allow users to not have to type passwords in, i couldn't justify its cost/effect. I could go on site but as others have pointed that requires new servers/vms and a complex setup, not to mention the fact that this if failed would kill access to O365.

Edited April 22, 2015 by rob101