Deploying Office 365 within a primary school

[SimonL]

Deploying Office 365 within a primary school

Morning all,

 

We have inherited the IT support for a local primary school.

 

At the moment, their IT room PCs use a legacy Office 2016 licence. We would like to take advantage of their Office 365 licences and deploy that instead.

 

In this particular school, the PCs are on the local domain and all of the pupils have their own individual domain accounts (and email address) and login to the PCs using this account.

 

We had thought that we could create dummy Office accounts for each PC (PC1, PC2 etc), login to office.com using that account, download and install Office, job done.

 

However, if for example, "Pupil A" then logs on using their account, Office is reporting that it is unlicenced and prompting for "Pupil A" to sign in to continue using Office. This isn't really practical in this school environment, where multiple pupils are using any given PC.

 

I'm looking for a clever way of installing and deploying Office to these PCs. Any ideas ?

 

Thanks in advance for your time and assistance.

[CyBeRkId2002]

It all depends on how you have licensed Office 2016.

 

• If you have access to a KMS server or MAK key you can license Office per computer so sign-in won't be necessary (Honestly, if you don't want cloud accounts and your licensing covers it this is the easiest option in your scenario)
  
• If you don't have access to this then it would be preferable to create the student accounts online for individual users. This can be done automatically via Azure AD Sync from your school server and the benefits of doing it this way are simplified management and the fact that you can do SSO so it does not prompt for credentials when starting. To access the Office 365 suite you will need an appropriate license assigning to all students, but if you are licensing all FTE staff for A3 then you get Student Use Benefit licences free of charge (speak to your reseller about this).
  

[CyBeRkId2002]

Sorry, just re-read and understand you want to go from 2016 to Office365. I think the above still applies and can still be licensed via MAK but will need to check the specific license agreement you have in place.

[chaplic]

You have to roam the office activation

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/DeployOffice/overview-shared-computer-activation#:~:text=Licensing%20token%20roaming%20Starting%20with%20Version%201704%20of,computer%20and%20was%20associated%20with%20that%20specific%20computer.

[Scifigirl]

You have to roam the office activation

 

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/DeployOffice/overview-shared-computer-activation#:~:text=Licensing%20token%20roaming%20Starting%20with%20Version%201704%20of,computer%20and%20was%20associated%20with%20that%20specific%20computer.

 

Does this mean the PC's have to be in Azure - sorry to nip in......

[chaplic]

Im not entirely sure what you mean by "in azure" but the answer is likely no in any case. Youd want the machines Hybrid Azure AD Domain joined at least as I recall it improves sign in experience of onedrive, but the license file in shared computer activation is just a parcel that you have to pass between machines. I've seen it done on fileservers and also with ue-v

[MartinByard]

I would think that you'd want to install Office 365 using the "Shared Computer Activation" mode: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/overview-shared-computer-activation

The only downside to this is that each user who logs on to the computers needs to have an Office license assigned to them to be able to use it - otherwise I think Office acts as a viewer only.

 

There is no need to have any machines Hybrid joined using this method, unlike using the device license route.

[Mr.Ben]

I would think that you'd want to install Office 365 using the "Shared Computer Activation" mode: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/overview-shared-computer-activation

The only downside to this is that each user who logs on to the computers needs to have an Office license assigned to them to be able to use it - otherwise I think Office acts as a viewer only.

 

There is no need to have any machines Hybrid joined using this method, unlike using the device license route.

This is correct.

 

If you are on EES terms you can get device based activation as well, which does away with the need for a light user to have a licence.