Office 365 Licensing confusion

[TheRobins]

I am looking to move to office 365 in the summer holidays. I noticed since I last looked at it that the pricing structure has changed and has now really confused me.

 

As part of our OVS agreement we have Office 365 ProPlus included. Now they throw in E1 and E3 which doesn't make much sense to me. To be fair when has Microsoft done it the easy way.

 

Im just looking for an idiots guide or what is what. My main aim is to completely move our email to the cloud, Services such as Office applications and the cloud and onedrive would be nice but not essential.

[Steve21]

E1+ProPlus (Student/Faculty) all free (request through Supplier for OVS etc) done

 

E1 = everything apart from Office at home.

ProPlus = Office at home

 

Pretty much

 

Steve

[TheRobins]

Thanks Steve, Whats E3 all about then

[Steve21]

afaik, it was the full package (paid for) before they made it all free, and is still available for Enterprise as only free to schools etc.

 

E.g. Office at home wasn't included before on E1, nor SkyDrive etc. (Maybe~)

 

Steve

[TheRobins]

Office 365

 

That helps clear it up abit,

 

The Microsoft site https://products.office.com/en-ie/academic/compare-office-365-education-plans doesnt take into affect ProPlus and OVS agreements, so as you rightly say the free E1 gives me all I need including 1 drive.

[Boredguy]

As @Steve21 says, "Office 365 Education E1 for Faculty" or "Office 365 Education E1 for Students" is the minimum you need, and both are free

 

If you get your OVS agreement tied up with your 365 Tenancy, you should then get "Office 365 Education for Faculty" and "Office 365 Education for Students" which has between 500,000 and 1,000,000 licences assigned to your account (for us it only appeared once I set out domain to the Self signup for the ProPlus for staff/students - linky)

[TheRobins]

Thanks for that. I obviously need to transfer our domain to it which could be fun taking a live .sch.uk address across from our LEA,

 

Let the fun begin.

[Boredguy]

To begin with the process, you only need the LA to put a text file into their DNS so that it can be validated as you having the domain ownership which the 365 process will generate for you.

 

You can then set everything else up in advance and just have the MX records updated when you get round to using the e-mail portion in anger.

 

We ran 365 and our current e-mail system side by side for 4 months to get everything setup before we had the MX record pointed to Microsoft and then migrated the e-mails over.

[TheRobins]

Bingo that would be great, I've just looked around at some other local schools and one or two have 365 along with their old email servers which are still online so obviously that's the way they went around it. Hopefully I can get it all setup and aim for a September switch over, but as you pointed out I could delay until christmas to transfer over.

[TheRobins]

Thanks all for your tips, all signed up and active