Office 365 ProPlus or Office 365 A3 alongside a potential OVS-ES agreement

[lpha]

Hello there.

I've been looking online for weeks to understand exactly how the education licensing actually works... but I keep finding opposite answers.

 

I am working in a K12 school in France as the new IT guy and for years our IT partners have bought one-shot licenses each time a computer was replaced.

I would like to change our licensing approach and replace the Google Workspace we are using with a Microsoft environment.

We currently have about 90 FTE and 180 devices.

 

What are we looking for?

(1) A mailing and file sharing solution for our all staff members, including those who are not counted as FTE because we want them to have a profesional email adress and share files with them.

The Google Workspace for Education system is great for that purpose as we can create an account for each staff member, granting them a Google Drive, Calendar, Email etc.

(2) Office desktop apps on our primary school computers, which are mainly used by one user (a computer = a staff member / a teacher)

(3) Office desktop apps on our secondary school computers, which is a more complicated environment :

• some computers are used by only one person (ie, staff members)
  
• classroom computers are shared by different teachers
  
• computer room devices are shared by all the students
  

And... we don't have a working AD yet.

 

Bonuses we would ♥ to have:

(4) Giving the teachers the possibility to work at home with microsoft office softwares

(5) Same, but for our students

What would be the best licensing solution in your opinion for our school?

Also, I would really be interested by some quotations because I'm reading very different amounts here and there.

Is 4000-5000€ for 90FTE (with 20% VAT) a correct price ?

 

Thanks for your feedback and ideas

Edited April 9, 2024 by lpha

[robintech]

I'm not an expert but will have a go anyway Sounds right for the standard pricing , £5.60 per FTE for Microsoft 365 A3 for faculty and student licences are given as a ratio for free some parts 40 per FTE ####################This will give your FTE and Students all the Office Desktop apps, Intune, P1 for MFA and trusted locations and can install desktop Office on 5 or maybe 10 personal devices as it might be increasing.################With Office installed as a shared device on the school computers those FTE will be prompted to sign in if they have not got a local profile or they haven't used that computer for about 30 days, then it remembers them, these activations don't count so it doesn't matter who signs in as long as they have a licence, students or staff will be ok doesn't use up their personal device allowance##########################Your other staff can have the Free A1 which is no desktop apps but all the email and 100GB storage now down from 1TB, you can add P1 to it for £0.56 per month so they get MFA###########################You also get Intune for Education which is a simplified front end and normal Intune in the licence along with Entra so you could go full cloud for AD#################https://www.rm.com/blog/2024/january/m365-education-storage-and-licence-changes-in-2024######################Sorry can't seem to add carriage returns so all one lump of text Edited April 10, 2024 by ittech2342323

[lpha]

That makes sense.

But would it be possible, with Office 365 A3, to simply use some "student licences" to create a couple of generic accounts for shared devices?

[robintech]

You could allocate student licences to the non FTE and it would work but would break your licencing agreement, they'd gain desktop apps which few people really need. The online ones work fine

[lpha]

I am not trying to break any agreement. To the contrary, I am looking for the most practical solution for our particular IT environment.

How do you set up your shared computers in UK schools (as I can see most ppl here are from UK)? Do you ask your staff and 10-14yo students to log in/log off each time they use a device?

And can you achieve this through an OVS-ES Office 365 A3 solution?

[robintech]

Not an expert so would check with a licensing partner but yes you can do shared device on OVS-ES Office 365 A3 depending on your setup they will be signed in automatically and its barely noticeable when we had it https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/deployoffice/overview-shared-computer-activation#how-shared-computer-activation-works-for-microsoft-365-appsI'd try and move to Microsoft 365 A3 for faculty as I feel Office 365 and then adding on extras isn't worth it anymore and is becoming outdated with Intune. A1 is free so you can spam accounts for one offs

[lpha]

Hey again.

 

Let's imagine I go for Office 365 A3 (not Microsoft 365 A3) along with an OVS-ES agreement, how do I manage the staff / students identities ?

How do I set up the identification on the school computers ? Can they simply use their microsoft (well, with our domain name) creditentials to access school computers ?

How do I manage group rules? Do I need a local server or is everything online?

Do I need to pay any extra for this authentification method ?

 

Everything is so confusing and I'm not getting any exact answers from resellers... at least in France.

That's why I'm so struggling to understand how this O365 for Education thingy works.

 

Again, thanks for your help.

[robintech]

First day of term so haven't got round to replying, will give you a bump in case someone can help

[Boredguy]

How users sign in will depend on the method you want to use.

In a traditional network, you would have all users in your AD and sync them up to Entra where you assign your Office 365 licence, but you can just as easily have pure cloud only accounts, especially if you go down the route of having only Entra joined devices and not Hybrid joined.

 

Either option, you can assign a licence type to a user group, so you don't have to manually assign licences to every user, just add the user to a "Student" group which gets assigned the "A3 Student User Licence" and the specific apps you want, or to a "Staff" group to assign the "A3 for Faculty Licence". The group can either be purely a "Cloud Only" group, or can be a local AD group, it doesn't matter.

 

If the user signs in to the device with the user account/e-mail address associated with the Entra account, Office will sign in. If you aren't signing in (such as a home device and you have the ProPlus option), then once Office 365 is installed you just sign in with your Entra username and password.

 

Most of our devices are Hybrid Joined devices, so they all exist in AD, but devices have Office 365 installed in Shared Licencing mode so as a user logs on, Office is licenced based on that users rights.. so if Joe Smith has a network account, but we've not provided them with a Office 365 licence, Word pops up the nice red bar saying "The product is not licenced"

 

Now which licence agreement would be best for your use can depend a lot on what existing licences you have, what you want to do etc.

On the old OVS-ESS agreements, you would get your "Core Cal" pack which gave you your server connection CALS for joining the AD etc, as well as your Office installation.

These days having a MS 365 A3 is similar as it includes your server CALS (needed if your connecting to Windows servers), but also licences you for InTune/Conditional Access/MFA etc which might be a better option over just a Office 365 A3.

 

If your moving from a pure Google environment with no onsite Windows Active Directory setup, then it's worth finding a good reseller to go through the licencing route, as you don't want to find out you don't have the correct licence type so your users aren't licenced to access a Windows DHCP server for example.

[NeoNebula]

Your school will need a comprehensive licensing solution that addresses the diverse needs of its users. Office 365 A3 or Office 365 ProPlus will provide desktop Office applications for staff and students. Plus, you might want to consider an OVS-ES agreement for managing device licenses. This will allow you to scale your licenses based on the number of devices you use. Prices can vary significantly depending on region, but €4,000-€5,000 for 90 licenses seems like a reasonable guideline cost.

[Rob_D]

Hey again.

Let's imagine I go for Office 365 A3 (not Microsoft 365 A3) along with an OVS-ES agreement, how do I manage the staff / students identities ?

How do I set up the identification on the school computers ? Can they simply use their microsoft (well, with our domain name) creditentials to access school computers ?

How do I manage group rules? Do I need a local server or is everything online?

Do I need to pay any extra for this authentification method ?

Everything is so confusing and I'm not getting any exact answers from resellers... at least in France.

That's why I'm so struggling to understand how this O365 for Education thingy works.

Again, thanks for your help.

 

If you're not already, it might be worth reaching out to a Microsoft support partner as they might be better able to take a more wholistic view of the project, and take your "I'd like to be able to..." and give you a straight "this is the solution, these are licenses you'd need, and this is how you'd set it up/we'd set it up for you", but that would probably come at additional cost.