Free MS office without using Office 365

[IT_Man_Dan]

Morning all,

 

We have volume licensing for Microsoft and as part of that we are able to give all staff and students a free copy of office.

The thing is, at the moment we use Google Apps here, not Office 365 so I was wondering if there is a way without me setting up Office 365 that I can allow students and staff to download and install office?

 

I spoke to my licence vender but the way they suggest involves setting up Office 365, importing users, and then assigning an activation to that user. I don't want to give the students office 365 accounts though, is that really the only way?!

 

There is a link here https://products.office.com/en-GB/student/office-in-education where students/staff just put in their school email address and if eligible it allows download, how do I get my school email domain added to this list? in the past that used to work through county by entering our grid for learning address because they had an agreement with microsoft.

 

Please advise

 

Many thanks

[garethEds]

I was thinking something similar the other day - but from a different angle. We used to have EES with Microsoft for Windows and Office but this year the LEA have purchased it county wide.

 

I was wondering how this affects our free Office for staff and student scheme? Were Microsoft giving it away anyway to faculty and staff regardless or license?

 

We use https://login.microsoftonline.com - but are happy for our pupils to use Office 365 and/or Office Pro which they can download for Mac or PC.

 

One question is that if we do not have a license vendor who do we contact to add more free licenses?

 

Cheers

 

Gareth

[IT_Man_Dan]

Just wondering if anyone has any info that might help, I've contacted our licensing vendor but have had no reply as of yet.

[stitch]

I setup office 365 to use our Google domain user account name which are synced from our local AD, so the students use their Google Drive username and password to login to Office 365.

[IT_Man_Dan]

@stitch Thanks for your response.

 

How did you setup Office 365 to use your Google domain etc? Sorry, I haven't really looked into Office 365 much yet and only want it so that users can install office.

 

The setup I have here is Google Apps and I use GADS to sync my users from AD. Is it fairly simple to setup Office 365 to use Google credentials?

 

Many thanks

[garethEds]

After reading about Google above I should have added to my post that we sync our AD with Azure using AADSync from Microsoft. This synchronises our AD with Azure, adds/removes users as they appear and keeps passwords synced (one way).

 

Works really well but our email is still held by the LEA.

 

Gareth

[stitch]

No Problem. Is your local Active Directory name a .local one, as ours is.

 

Firstly, I set up office 365 with myself as the main admin so that I could log in to the office 365 portal.

I then went into Active Directory Domains and Trusts under Administrative Tools on the DC, right click on the Active Directory Domains and Trusts and select properties. I then added our Google domain name as an alternative UPN suffix and then clicked OK.

I then had to change the log on suffix for each user. To do this I had to go to each AD user and under the account tab change the UPN suffix from our local domain name to the Google domain name one which is added by doing the above step to the drop down box. I use Dovestones software to bulk create our users, so it was quite simple to make this change to all 1200 users.

In the office 365 portal I then followed the instructions for setting up the AD sync. This uses Azure Connect to create the connections between your local AD, Azure Ad and Office 365.

 

I have found that once this is all setup, like Gareth has said "This synchronises our AD with Azure, adds/removes users as they appear and keeps passwords synced (one way)".

 

I hope this helps a bit.

[IT_Man_Dan]

Thanks @stitch I've now configured things as you did above and am successfully able to have users login and download/install Office. Did you disable any particular settings or anything?

 

Many thanks

[stitch]

No, I have just left the settings as they are.