MS Home Use Program - using School email address

[fiza]

Previously we only had Staff on our email system so providing MS HUP using the email address as verification worked well. We now use Gmail and all our students are on the same domain as us. Staff would still need to provide a code that we give them to purchase the software but I am worried that the code may leak out to students.

 

Is there another way to control who uses MS HUP?

[jmak]

No reason not to have an O365 tenancy as well as your Google Suite set up. It's free (for the basic version and you can validate it against your school domain). Then staff (and students if you want to allow it) can self serve free Office. There's no requirement to actually use O365 for anything in school.

[fiza]

No reason not to have an O365 tenancy as well as your Google Suite set up. It's free (for the basic version and you can validate it against your school domain). Then staff (and students if you want to allow it) can self serve free Office. There's no requirement to actually use O365 for anything in school.

Would we still need to issue email addresses for staff on 0365 to validate against? I guess they would receive their validation email on 0365 so we would need to issue them?

[jmak]

Would we still need to issue email addresses for staff on 0365 to validate against? I guess they would receive their validation email on 0365 so we would need to issue them?

Once you register successfully, you get a myschoolname.onmicrosoft.com domain allocated and you can then import usernames from a CSV file to create email addresses based on that. I then used the export feature to create a spreadsheet with the O365 usernames and passwords into a spreadsheet with the school email addresses and set up a mail merge to send users their O365 login details and left the rest up to them.

 

You can register your school domain to O365 so that the username matches the school email address - a small extra step for you at setup, but saves repeating the login name endlessly...

 

The whole thing was only a few minutes work and earned me brownie points with staff. I think for secondaries it's quite a nice offering for students too.

[fiza]

Once you register successfully, you get a myschoolname.onmicrosoft.com domain allocated and you can then import usernames from a CSV file to create email addresses based on that. I then used the export feature to create a spreadsheet with the O365 usernames and passwords into a spreadsheet with the school email addresses and set up a mail merge to send users their O365 login details and left the rest up to them.

 

You can register your school domain to O365 so that the username matches the school email address - a small extra step for you at setup, but saves repeating the login name endlessly...

 

The whole thing was only a few minutes work and earned me brownie points with staff. I think for secondaries it's quite a nice offering for students too.

 

 

I think that will be a problem for us. We have just moved away from everyone having 2 email addresses to just having gmail.

[jmak]

I could be wrong, but I don't think so...

 

They just validate that you're a genuine education institution from your domain (similar to the process for registering for Google Suite for Education) and I used our private one, not our county.sch.uk domain to register. The O365 tenancy is then created and you create the users manually (unless you're syncing with AD, which I guess as a Google school you're not). The only thing I used email addresses for was to send out the details to staff with mail merge - they were never shared with Microsoft as we have exchange email hosted by County. I've just had a quick look and it looks like mail merge isn't built in to Gmail, which seems a surprising omission, but there are loads of add ons to allow it. I wondered if it was something you could achieve through Classroom.

[fiza]

Sorry I'm confused! Would I need to issue new email addresses to staff for them to take advantage of the free Office offer? i don't want them to have to log in to/have access to another email account just to get free office.

[jmak]

If you're confused I'm clearly not doing well at explaining... My only excuse is that I'm in holiday mode and fixing bikes rather than computers...

 

They need O365 logins to download the software. I distributed the details to their school email addresses eg

 

"Dear teacher

 

I am completely lovely and have arranged for you to get MS Office completely free - never complain about anything to me ever again.

 

Just click on this link,

Enter this username: [email protected]

And use this password: password123

 

Love from

 

jmak"

 

I sent them out as paper Christmas cards one year - it bought me a few weeks of peace...

[fiza]

Ok I see now. They don't need to actually log in to the 0365 email account, they just need to use the details to validate themselves for the free Office offer?

My issue was that giving staff details of another email address when we have just got rid of one would be too confusing for them. If I can play it as 'this is the login you need to use to get free Office' then it might not be too bad!!

[jmak]

👍

Ours were suitably grateful

[Valyyn]

Why not add your domain to your Microsoft tenancy anyway? That way you can also get users syncing automatically and it won't affect your Google things.

 

For example, here our staff use their normal school email address and password to log in to both Google and Microsoft things. As long as you don't change your MX DNS records, the two will happily live side-by-side with no impact on each other.

 

You can then set up Azure AD Connect to sync your users and passwords to Microsoft, so you don't need to worry about manually importing them and sending passwords etc. You can also very easily script in adding their Office 365 download permissions as part of user creation in future.

Edited August 7, 2017 by Valyyn