[ms office - 2016] Apologies for dumb questions but...

[kennysarmy]

We're a secondary school with Office 2016 about to be rolled out in the summer to all our desktops (upgrade from 2010)

 

I keep seeing more and more schools move to Office 365.

 

Pages like this:

https://products.office.com/en-us/student/office-in-education?ms.officeurl=students

 

Suggest staff and students can sign up for free so they can use online versions of:

 

Outlook Word Excel PowerPoint OneNote

 

 

We have an on-site email solution we're happy with and are not looking to change.

 

 

The questions I have are:

 

If staff/students sign up for free - how can they use Outlook? It won't be able to link to our email server or authenticate...

 

If staff/students sign up for free - what's the advantages in me enrolling the school?

 

Is there a way to get all staff and students the advantages of being able to use online versions of Word Excel PowerPoint OneNote (from home and on the go) with as little pain for me as possible?

I presume they can only edit and work on documents they store in the cloud only?

 

 

Is the free offering just a hook to get you sucked in?

[djm968]

Most Schools that move to Office 365 also move their email service to Microsoft and implement Microsoft Azure to sync Office 365 to the on premises AD.

[TwistedHelixis]

Both MS and Google offer exceptional cloud services - no mater how good your current email system is I would be looking at moving that to one of these.

 

what's the advantages in me enrolling the school?

You can control how it all works, run audits (legal requirement), remove users when they leave. think of it like a windows network, you would not run a windows network without the server.

 

I presume they can only edit and work on documents they store in the cloud only?

Kind of depends on how you deploy it - You can sync files to a folder on your local machine and work on them whenever

 

Is the free offering just a hook to get you sucked in?

Nobody has a crystal ball and MS does have a history of changing its prices (not everything is free from MS) but its free at the moment and not that much of an issue to jump ship if needed. BTW Google Apps is all free with unlimited storage and backup.

 

I would suggest you do what I did years ago and sign up for both and have a play.