Office 365 in schools

[ianphillips42]

Does anyone use Office 365 in schools? Particularly interested in the sharing / collaboration that I think it will help with between staff and students?? Looking to get it right from the start..

[MrFrostmaul]

We have just fully rolled out Office 365 for emails, SharePoint etc.

 

So far found it really useful in one document shared instead of many copies of the same documents all over the system.

I would recommend for you to look at Teacher Dashboard which is free for upto 100 teachers, which allows for a submission/homework collection and assignment system which is great for sharing files between teachers and students.

[mrnoisy]

Teacher dashboard is now unlimited for teachers, they are implementing a paid service for student dashboard I haven't caught up with all the details yet but it's certainly worth a look.

[SteveM555]

We have been using Office 365 Email for a couple of years...

 

Recently teachers have found out that they can share documents, files etc. with each other using OneDrive online. MS have made some good improvements lately. We don't use Sharepoint online but may look at it if people are interested.

[simpsonj]

Also add that OneNote for Teachers is worth a look. Currently trialing it here.

[JRowley]

We are moving our email to Office 365 and from there going to play around with Office 365 Groups for staff departmental working, and perhaps sharepoint. On the student side they are all on Office 365 for email and we may look at Teacher Dashboard for setting homeworks etc.

[kennysarmy]

We have been using Office 365 Email for a couple of years...

 

Recently teachers have found out that they can share documents, files etc. with each other using OneDrive online. MS have made some good improvements lately. We don't use Sharepoint online but may look at it if people are interested.

 

Hi,

 

Is that your whole site using Office 365 for email or just your teachers?

[GeekyPete]

Had it for all staff and students for over a year at two schools I look after.

[kennysarmy]

I've been doing some tentative looking in to the advantages in us moving to Office 365, primarily for email - is a hosted solution better? I'm still not convinced.

 

Here are a couple of responses, one from a reseller who I asked about pricing and one from the company that provides support on our on-site email solution:

 

Some good news for a change, if you haven’t already requested this you can get a product called Student Advantage (basically Office 365 Pro Plus) added free to your annual agreement as you have Office covered internally via the Desktop Option for both Staff & Students (for as long as you are a part of the annual program) we would just need you to email requesting it be added along with Staff and student numbers.

As far as where this sits within Office 365 I couldn’t say for definite (although as far as I am aware it does include admin rights for Office for iPad) as it is a product that Microsoft themselves supply not via us so may be worth you checking out Microsoft-s Office 365 portal but from what I understand this version is far superior to the free product MS offer without having an agreement but not quite at the more costly E3 subscription program via the annual agreement

 

&

 

Bear in mind that even though it’s free, I would still be a little bit wary of handing over control of your email services to a 3rd party.

I think there’s a lot to be said for having your email on your own server. Maintaining complete control of a critical service like email (as you currently have with MDaemon) has a lot of plus points.

Yep, completely understand and it’s hard not to be enticed by O365 given that it’s completely free.

It does put you completely at the mercy of their service and support though so bear that in mind.

While we can’t compete with O365 on price, I think there’s still a lot to be said for organisations maintaining their own dedicated email server that they keep complete control over.

I think some IT resellers are selling O365 on the basis that it removes all the responsibilities related to looking after your organisation’s email – but is that really a good (and realistic) thing to expect?

I’m sure there’ll come a day where O365 gets hacked in some way resulting in emails stored there ending up in the public domain – god only knows what happens then! If all your student’s emails potentially ended up in the public domain, who would get the flack?

 

Comments?

[simpsonj]

Interesting, as my school have never hosted their own emails (First class - Microsoft for Education - Office 365) we haven't experienced any major issues other than a rather horrible handover when the County decided not to manage our emails anymore, and not to transfer the mailboxes for us. The few times I've used Microsoft support has actually been very good, aside from the time difference and getting called after school hours.

 

The 'I'm sure there'll come a day where O365 gets hacked..." just sounds like scare mongering to me. Okay it's definitely possible, but then it's equally possible that someone will access a mail server within the school as well.

 

But then, I prefer important things to managed and stored on systems that the school could never afford to maintain. Our SIMS is hosted by ScoMIS, which allows for easy home access and is backed up hourly and is stored on a server farm with resiliency I couldn't hope to match. The same applies to Office 365, along with the added benefits that all our staff and students can now access web versions of Office, have so much online storage space they'll never fill it and can install Office 2013 on 5 devices, android, apple or windows.

 

I have to admit, I've never strongly considered moving to a non-hosted system for email, should I be? Even if the school decided that Microsoft wasn't worth the cost of the EES agreement, and we went Open source, I think we would still go with Google Apps for Education over an in-house system.

[NB9457]

Primary schools, 365 all the way. Why? Because it's free, it is indefinitely secure (most self hosted email servers are probably much less secure) and it's simple.

 

High Schools on the other hand, 365 for students, internally hosted for staff. The main benefit of hosting internally is if the internet or O365 goes down, staff can still easily contact each other and admin staff can continue with their work with emails being pushed out once issues are resolved.

[witch]

Always had externally hosted and Office 365 is pretty good - all transfer issues swiftly handled by Microsoft support.

Have had few issues since

[foofighterjim]

High Schools on the other hand, 365 for students, internally hosted for staff. The main benefit of hosting internally is if the internet or O365 goes down, staff can still easily contact each other and admin staff can continue with their work with emails being pushed out once issues are resolved.

 

I would say in this day in age secondary schools need to be considering their internet connection redundancy, rather than this being the reason for bringing things in house.

[kennysarmy]

I would say in this day in age secondary schools need to be considering their internet connection redundancy, rather than this being the reason for bringing things in house.

 

 

But that all adds to the cost....and with squeezed budgets....

[zag]

Yeh there is no reason to host exchange internally now really. Office 365 for students and staff here for a couple of years now. No problems.

[NB9457]

I would say in this day in age secondary schools need to be considering their internet connection redundancy, rather than this being the reason for bringing things in house.

 

True, but sometimes it's not cost efficient and that doesn't take into account having issues with Microsoft's site, doesn't take into account issues at a local exchange, onsite hardware issues, the fact some schools are tied to their LAs for internet access, etc..

 

Plus, if your SLA is good enough, you shouldn't have to worry about mass amounts of downtime as it'd be a breach of contract.