Office 365 other than email

[discoveranother]

Hi all,

 

I'd just like to ask if anyone who has schools i.e. mainly primary schools as their customers, if they have staff using Office 365 for anything other than email use. I haven't got schools storing any data whatsoever on Onedrive, simply because even though the data is encrypted during transit and at rest, I have read many an article that the data could well be accessed by Microsoft employees and also the data is not backed up by Microsoft. I'm not sure how true this is.

 

Anyway, does anyone out there have schools using Yammer, Sway or Sharepoint or anything else other than emails.

 

Thanks all.

[robyholmes]

We use Office 365 pretty heavily here. We're not using Yammer but everything else is used. In terms of backups, it depends how wide you want to class 'Backup'. Office 365 runs across multiple data centers making it geo redundant. Previous versions of documents provides you with the 'I deleted that image last week). Then you can apply retention policies from a whole school level to keep data for x number of years.

[jmak]

We've replaced most of our file server storage with O365. MS Teams is the intended interface, although I prefer SharePoint - a web page with shortcuts to the top level filters works better for me - and then use OneDrive Files on Demand for anything I think I'll use more than once.

 

Check out the data privacy policies - they're explicit that no one at MS has access to your data. There's regularly speculation that there's a backdoor for the CIA or FBI, but it's always denied. My take is that I'm confident that MS are better at security than I'll ever be.

 

Guidance from the UK government is that is secure enough. You'll find that most government data is on either MS, Google or AWS servers - plenty that's at least as confidential as what's on school systems.

[discoveranother]

Thanks for the replies.

 

I agree that MS will be more secure than anyone else would ever be - I think !!!

 

I'd love to get my schools making more use of O365 but they would need training.

[HTCPCP]

I have heavily used office 365 and Google Apps over the last few years. Going back to when I was working in Education a couple of years ago, one of my primary sites was really heavily o365 based. With the right staff, and leadership buy in, it works well. As with everything, if leadership are on the fence, you risk a gap between those who do and those who don't, and then eventually a break down and resentment.

 

The primary tried basically everything, and the only one that they got put off by was teams (after my time) as they were early adopters and it didn't do what the wanted to do and generally got annoyed by it.

 

When I left, all staff were using OneDrive, Skype for Business (used by reception a huge amount to prompt about registers, getting kids to come to reception, to hand out letters etc), Office online, and had started to use Yammer a bit - at least to for whole school notices, but they didn't seem to be big fans. Not sure what happened after my replacement left after 6 months though.

 

Staff basically used OneDrive for everything document wise, especially when doing colaborative work i.e. lesson planning etc.