[ms office - 2016] Office 365 - real basic questions !

[kennysarmy]

Currently we have MS Office on-site and I guess those students who want to complete homework at home make their own arrangements to purchase.

 

We have an on-premise Email solution (Mdaemon), staff/students have access to their files remotely using the FoldR solution & a Moodle VLE.

 

 

What are the pros & cons of us adopting Office 365 Education either the paid for or E5 offering?

 

Do we have to sign up all students on the free offering and then they upgrade to E5 if they wish?

 

 

Are there any good websites that explain all the basics ?

 

Cheers

[kennysarmy]

So I'm making some small steps of understanding...

 

Office 365 would replace our existing on-premise E-mail and Moodle VLE and we could use something like RM Unify to sync. teaching groups on our SIMS MIS to the "groups" on MS Classroom.

 

We've got a great Moodle VLE though with Overnet Data providing services and support in terms of integration with our SIMS data for automatic user creation at the student, staff and parent level - we'd lose all this moving to O365?

[gshaw]

Microsoft Classroom is dead, replaced with Teams (which isn't really the same thing at all but it's the new direction of travel)

 

There's a set of plugins available to link Moodle with O365 so you can pick files from OneDrive, use OneNote etc. natively

[kennysarmy]

What about costs?

 

How much is O365?

 

Are there really free offerings?

 

Do students only get the benefit of the offline Office products if the school pays?

[mavhc]

You could just move email of course, then test out other parts.

 

Office365 syncs quite well with AD, the MIS School Data Sync stuff is quite new, and being American, the SIMS support is even newer.

 

google and microsoft will sync mis data in csv files

 

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Free versions are fine, on Microsoft side you mostly pay if you want to install MS Office on your computer, instead of using the web versions