[ms office - o365] Microsoft 365 Apps licensing issues

[JackFrith]

Hi,

 

I am currently looking at rolling out Microsoft 365 Apps across a school. However, I have come across two issues to do with licensing which have stumped me.

 

1) We have A1 licencing for students which has the issue of only being able to be activated on about 5 devices. This obviously won't work for students as they will log in to multiple computers and as soon as that limit is reached, office will no longer be licenced for that user.

 

2) We also have accounts that have no access to the internet for various reasons. This means that they cannot get any licences as 365 Apps needs the internet to pull the user licenses.

 

The licencing for different versions of Microsoft products is very confusing and I would appreciate any ideas on how to get around these issues.

 

Thanks

[robyholmes]

Have a look at this, it's what we use and not had any issues with it hitting the 5 device limit:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/overview-shared-computer-activation

[JackFrith]

Hi,

 

Thank you for this link. I miss read this at first as I believed I didn't have the correct licencing. However, after installing Office 365 Apps on 6 different machines and logging into them with the same account, I came across no issues.

 

I still however am unsure if there is a way around the lack of internet for some users. I'm guessing there isn't really a way around this.

 

Thanks

[robyholmes]

Hi,

 

Thank you for this link. I miss read this at first as I believed I didn't have the correct licencing. However, after installing Office 365 Apps on 6 different machines and logging into them with the same account, I came across no issues.

 

I still however am unsure if there is a way around the lack of internet for some users. I'm guessing there isn't really a way around this.

 

Thanks

 

The only accounts we block internet access on are exam accounts and we use the fantastic ExamWritePad for that.

[Boredguy]

If you using the Office 365 Click to Run installer to make use of the A1 (or A1 Plus) licence, instead of using Office 2019 or 2021, then Shared Device Activation is the method to use for those users with internet connectivity allowed.

We've not found a limit yet even with a generic account logged on to a whole suite of computers when doing training.

 

For those accounts that have no internet access, then you are in a bit of a quandary. You could set it so those accounts only have access to the MS Activation site, and in 365 only enable the Office Apps section of the licence and not Exchange so it can be activated, otherwise if it's specific stations, then using the LSTB 2019/2021 versions of Office that don't have user licencing might be the better choice

[JackFrith]

Thank you for all your answers.

After testing the activation limit, I was able to surpass the 5 devices without any issues.

As for exam accounts I think ill look into ExamWritePad a bit more as this looks pretty good and has all the features like spell check already disabled which saves me going through group policy.

Thanks again for your suggestions.