Office 365 integration with Moodle

[localzuk]

So, we've now gone live with Moodle in our school. Our teachers had their first training session last night.

 

As always, however, I am not sitting still - new features and abilities are always going to be investigated and implemented if possible. So, this leads me to today's question:

 

What do I need to get our LEA to do to let us integrate with Office 365. Our staff email is provided by our LEA, using Office 365 (as of Friday). We don't have any admin access to it.

 

I have installed all the Office 365 integration plugins needed (I think).

 

What details do I need to ask for from the LEA and what details do I need to provide to them? Will they need to set anything special to allow the integration to happen?

[gshaw]

Yeah there's some stuff you need to do in Azure AD to get an app key to get the Moodle block to talk to O365

[localzuk]

Yeah there's some stuff you need to do in Azure AD to get an app key to get the Moodle block to talk to O365

 

I can't do it. I am not an admin in Office 365, our LEA are the admins. So, I'd need to know exactly what details I need to get them to send me, and what I would need to send to them.

[Michael]

I can't do it. I am not an admin in Office 365, our LEA are the admins. So, I'd need to know exactly what details I need to get them to send me, and what I would need to send to them.

 

Why hasn't a competent tech like you not got admin rights? Or at the very least, one of the admin type roles O365 offers?

[localzuk]

Why hasn't a competent tech like you not got admin rights? Or at the very least, one of the admin type roles O365 offers?

 

Staff email is provided by our LEA, so as to provide a unified solution across the entire county, with a single global address list. Its been this way for more than a decade. The powers that be don't want to handle email in house and lose that global address list.

 

So, we are just users of the LEA's Office 365 setup, with no admin rights and no control. Want to reset a password? We phone them up.

 

They're not looking at delegated rights yet, as there's thousands of users and hundreds of schools on the system. They don't have the man power to be rolling it out (its only just been introduced, to replace an ageing Exchange setup) and to be looking at providing local level control just yet.

[Michael]

It sounds to me all schools are under the same O365 tenancy, even though there are ways to publish GALs to different O365 tenancies.

 

So presumably you have another O365 tenancy for pupils?

[localzuk]

It sounds to me all schools are under the same O365 tenancy, even though there are ways to publish GALs to different O365 tenancies.

 

So presumably you have another O365 tenancy for pupils?

 

That is correct, it is one giant tenancy.

 

We don't have pupil email here - we've, until recently, been using Frog as our internal mail system for pupils (they only go up to age 13 here), and before that RM EasyMail. We're likely going to be using the Moodle messaging system for a similar purpose now too.

 

Providing real email for pupils isn't currently on our radar as far as I know - there's been no requests for it from IT as a subject, and the SLT haven't asked for it.

[Michael]

I'm betting then (thinking logically), that if everything is under one giant tenancy, that any customisation will affect all e-mail domains (if different), so I'm wondering if they'll discard the request?

 

Personally I think for a group of schools or a small Academy trust, then yes a single tenancy can work. For many schools, completely independent - I don't think it's a good idea from a design perspective, but that's just my opinion. I appreciate it wasn't a decision made by yourself.

 

I usually configure e-mail accounts for all pupils, but then configure O365 mail rules, so any e-mail received externally is deleted. E-mail can only be received from whitelisted domains, such as a neighbouring school or anything internal, such as from staff accounts.

[localzuk]

I'm betting then (thinking logically), that if everything is under one giant tenancy, that any customisation will affect all e-mail domains (if different), so I'm wondering if they'll discard the request?

 

I don't know, I can't really see why they would - the request is to allow our users to access the system. They'd not be getting any more rights. I don't think they'd be against it, as they are keen to see people use it effectively.

 

Personally I think for a group of schools or a small Academy trust, then yes a single tenancy can work. For many schools, completely independent - I don't think it's a good idea from a design perspective, but that's just my opinion. I appreciate it wasn't a decision made by yourself.

 

I usually configure e-mail accounts for all pupils, but then configure O365 mail rules, so any e-mail received externally is deleted. E-mail can only be received from whitelisted domains, such as a neighbouring school or anything internal, such as from staff accounts.

 

At some point we may look at it, but at the moment, not something important to us. Plus, if we have 2 different Office 365 tenancies to deal with, I don't think we can integrate both of them into Moodle.

[Michael]

Do all staff from different schools use the same web domain or different web domains? If different, then in theory it may be possible. If all staff use the same web domain, then I can't see how you wouldn't essentially open up the whole O365 tenancy to your Moodle instance (if that makes sense)!

[localzuk]

Do all staff from different schools use the same web domain or different web domains? If different, then in theory it may be possible. If all staff use the same web domain, then I can't see how you wouldn't essentially open up the whole O365 tenancy to your Moodle instance (if that makes sense)!

 

The same one, yeah. We have the option to add an alias domain, but we'd still really be using the single domain.

[Michael]

But then surely the staff in question would need to login using the alias domain rather than their real one?