Can you use Office 365 to network other schools together

[chumpmonkey]

We are slowly introducing Office 365 to our school. Many staff have asked can we use Office 365 to form a clod based network that would link our secondary school to the local primary schools. To share resources the students could access etc? Is this possible has anyone done this?

[LukeRowberry]

We were talking about this yesterday. I think we might be going down the route of giving 1 username per primary and the kids can share 'cause password management will be PITA!

[mukz]

I am keeping an eye on this topic, we have 4 schools and would like to do just this as Sixth Formers roam across the sites.

[TwistedHelixis]

Can you not white-list domains, similar to Google apps?

[blueplanetit]

This should be possible, you could create one tenant with multiple domains for each school. What resources do you want to share? How are you managing your office 365 accounts, is this sync'd with AD or are they just cloud accounts?

[apearce]

We are slowly introducing Office 365 to our school. Many staff have asked can we use Office 365 to form a clod based network that would link our secondary school to the local primary schools. To share resources the students could access etc? Is this possible has anyone done this?

 

Hi Chump Monkey. There are a few different option and it all depends on what you want to share. The first is called B2B in Azure AD. This will add the users to your AD Tenant so you can add them to Security groups in your tenant and then you can use them in SharePoint Online. You upload a CSV files of their email address to your tenant and you can manage them from there. You have several thousand at a time.

 

Sharing in SharePoint Online. This can be easy and simple for a single or a few users. From here you can add their email address and they get permission.

 

Office 365 Group. External users will see everything as members of a group and collaborate together. This includes the files in sharepoint and the calendar but not yet available with PowerBi and Planner. I've started using Groups heavily with customers now we have external access storing our files in and SP and notes in OneNote.

 

The downside to all this is the process to add them. All of the above require the user who you want to add to receive an email, they must then click on a link to log in with their account and then they are added to the group, SPO site etc. They have 30 days to click on the link otherwise their invite is removed.

[IAMCloud_Leon]

Disclaimer: I work for the company I'm about to recommend, so feel free to ignore my advice. But IAM Cloud sounds like a pretty good fit for what you're looking for https://www.iamcloud.com It can do what apearce mentions, but all the O365 provisioning, licensing and group membership stuff is automated from AD or Capita SIMS etc (or wherever your users are). Once you've decided how you want it to work, you won't need to do any ongoing manual stuff. Just keep your source system up to date, and everything else should sort itself out.