An ideal Multi Academy Trust Office 365 setup

[Stu-Wibird]

What is the perfect MAT O365 setup?

 

This is a question for anyone who supports O365 across a MAT or has been thinking about the best way of doing this. If you were starting from the ground up, what works well? what would you do differently? what lessons have you learned along the way?

 

The MAT who have asked me to look into this are already using O365 between 2 schools, but want to make sure that the decisions they make now are not going to cause problems further down the line.

 

Currently they have subdomains for each school in a single tenancy. They are in the format school.MAT.com. They also have users who work across the MAT who use MAT.com as their domain. There is currently no synchronisation between each schools on-prem AD based domains and O365. A few of the questions that spring to mind are:

 

- What is the best way to sync multiple legacy domains with a MAT O365 setup? - How might this look further down the line if the MAT wants to move to a single Azure AD across all sites and do away with the legacy domains in each school?

- What would the process be for a new school joining the MAT?

- What would the process be if a school left the MAT?

- What should the potential autonomy of IT support in each school look like? I.e. if there is a network manager in one school, how much or how little of the MAT's O365 setup should they be able to manage Vs a centralised administrator?

- What does it look like when users move between schools? Both as a permanent move and on a peripatetic basis?

 

It strikes me that there are a lot of potential compromises that might be seen as beneficial in the short term, but which will become bigger limitations further down the line. The option of short term pain for long term gain may be more desirable.

 

Hopefully your thoughts on this can for a useful resource for anyone else who is on this path...Thanks in advance

 

Stu

[StephenPink]

Unfortunately I don't have the answer - however am currently thinking about the exact same questions! The single tenancy, with subdomains and the format you have posted is actually the direction I was thinking of going, so interested in seeing what others are doing...

 

Cheers,

Stephen