live@edu

[gshaw]

PHP 5.3 works fine with it, in fact at one point it needed 5.3 or later to work but works OK on 5.2.5 which is what we have at the moment.

 

Are all the PHP required modules enabled (curl, mhash etc?)

[RabbieBurns]

are you sure 5.3 works? From research today it shows that mhash was removed from php 5.3 PHP: PHP 5.3.0 Release Announcement

Removed the following extensions: ext/mhash (see ext/hash), ...

 

The issue was that after clicking the outlook live button in moodle, and then taking you to the live.com login page, it would then return to moodle a login unsuccessful which would display an error from moodle about login failed. (see attached)

 

Its frustrating that our moodle is outsourced. They are blaming the upgrade to php 5.3 for breaking it, and whinging for microsoft not supporting an open source project (MS is focussed on 365 now and has no interest in the old plugin). Why they even went live with a php upgrade, without testing it with everything in the first place is beyond me.

 

edit: also, what ramifications does the URL changes have to the plugin?

[zag]

Why not give up on all this integration stuff and just do normal single sign on with a web page button?

[RabbieBurns]

because that requires logging into live@edu which then also single sign on's them into moodle. It requres changing moodle to use live@edu as its authenticator.

 

Not all of our users use live@edu, but they all use moodle, so theres no way that would work.

[vikpaw]

Possibly unrelated, however i had an issue with logging in to live@edu from my phone at the weekend. It was working one minute and then not the next. I thought it might have been the changes that were advertised quite some time ago, that involved alterations to the URLs and links. Could these have an impact?

 

I did a bit of searching and found one workaround was to login to the website manually, then take the domain specified there and copy it to the server setting on phone. This i did, changing from pod51002 to amrpd002 or something like that. Then it suddenly started working again. However the other users of phone synch didn't get this, so it's probably just a glitchy little thing. May be of interest though.

[gshaw]

Why not give up on all this integration stuff and just do normal single sign on with a web page button?

 

Because it's a backwards way of doing things, whatever platform we run it should be integrated as part of a single portal. As a user I expect all my information to be in one place and not have to bounce off to multiple websites \ authentication pages to get to things. Takes a lot more effort on the back end but it's a much smoother user experience when done right.

[sukh]

FYI - If you don't know already.

 

Important

 

 

A configuration change is coming to Outlook Live

 

 

In April 2011, we will begin upgrading Live@edu Outlook Live customers from the current email filtering platform to Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE). FOPE is a hosted service that helps protect inbound and outbound email from spam, phishing scams and email policy violations. It provides administrators with much greater flexibility and control than the current system, including the ability to safelist an IP address range (CIDR) and set up encrypted TLS connections. There is no impact on end users during this upgrade, and administrators do not need to take any action to prepare for the upgrade. After the move to FOPE is complete, your IP filtering administrative experience changes and much more functionality is available.

Domains that are upgraded to FOPE will receive all features, except those that are specific to on-premises deployments, such as configuration of domains or adding users, which are not available to hosted domains. For more information about FOPE and how to manage and configure settings, please see the following resources:

• Complete documentation: FOPE User Guide

 

• An entire set of 32 videos including 4 introductory videos for FOPE.

 

This is what you can expect for the upgrade schedule:

• Customers must first be moved to the Outlook Live service update to become eligible for upgrade to FOPE. If you have already upgraded to this platform or on-boarded directly to this platform, we will inform you before we upgrade you to FOPE.

• If your domain is not yet upgraded to the latest service update, we will notify you when that update is scheduled and you can expect upgrade to FOPE to follow after your Outlook Live upgrade is complete. We will also notify you before we start the upgrade to FOPE.

• If your email filtering system has already been moved to FOPE as part of an early adopter programme, we will modify your user interface to provide access to the FOPE admin centre after your upgrade to the Outlook Live service update is complete.

• Not all customers will meet the upgrade criteria at this time. The following configurations will prevent simple upgrade to FOPE:

º Skiplisting is in place. This means that you have added IP address entries to the gateway server field in SMP. For more information about this scenario, please see the help topic IP Safelisting for Mail Delivery and Relay.

 

º More than 40 IP addresses are safelisted in SMP. Our standard upgrade process can only support up to 40 IP address entries. Manual setup is required to preserve the current settings.

º A shared address space configuration where MX records do not resolve to Outlook Live.

 

• We will follow up with these customers as they are identified to process a manual upgrade. Please see the help topic IP Safelisting for Mail Delivery and Relay for more information about safelisting configuration. You may be able to make modifications to your configuration to meet migration criteria.

• Although you must upgrade to FOPE, you may choose to delay the upgrade when you receive notification that your domain is scheduled. All upgrades must be completed by 1 November 2011.

 

This is what you can expect during the upgrade process:

• You will receive an email notification about one week before your specific upgrade is scheduled to start. You can delay the upgrade to FOPE at that time by contacting Live@edu Support within 3 business days. You will be expected to identify an acceptable timeframe for your upgrade when you contact Support. All upgrades to FOPE must be completed by 1 November 2011.

• During the upgrade period you will not be able to update safelists and the SMP user interface for configuring safelists will be disabled.

• The upgrade process will sync your domain information, currently safelisted IP addresses and administrator account information to FOPE. This step enables outbound mail flow through FOPE. After this step has been completed successfully, we update DNS records to enable inbound mail flow through FOPE and send an email message to verify that all operations were successful. These steps are timed carefully to ensure that there is no disruption to mail flow.

• We will notify you by email after all the upgrade steps have been completed. All safelist configurations will now be done in the FOPE administration centre, which can be accessed through single sign-on from ECP or from SMP.

 

Thanks!

Live@edu FOPE upgrade team

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[RabbieBurns]

also a quick question, has the co-branding broken for anyone else? Our custom logo etc is not displaying, and it looks like the actual real-estate space available for a logo has decreased considerably.

 

Ive got a case open with MS at the moment, and they are still unsure if it is a bug, or a change in the features.. Frustrating..

[gshaw]

I didn't dare turn co-branding back on after it broke the login flow for the Moodle plugin a while back, for the sake of a tiny logo in the corner it wasn't worth the risk

[RabbieBurns]

its more than a tiny logo in the corner, its the whole theme of outlook live. Like the themes in OWA 2010 SP1 for example, but you have your own custom built one.

 

We paid a design company a lot of money to design ours, so we are kinda keen to get it back working

[Mr.Ben]

Ditto to Rabbie Burns, The bar that could be customised at the top of the screen seems to have reduced by 50%. I have removed the customisation for now as it looked awful, but I would like to get it back in the future.

[RabbieBurns]

I don't even remember any announcement that this was going to happen? My support guy Ive got helping me has not yet admitted that it has changed, and in fact, if you go to the co-branding pages in eduadmin, it still specifies the old dimensions.

 

I have currently put it to them that they should resize my logo for me so it fits perfectly in the new space. We will see how that plays out.

 

The internal BUG ID is # 28460 if you want to open a case with them and give them that it might make them fix it quicker?

[Mr.Ben]

Will do Rabbie, thanks for the case number, I will post mine up tomorrow when I call (I'm working from home today). I don't remember it being annouced either - and I had noticed that the old dimensions are still in the co-branding pages!

[nadeem]

HAs anyone had issues with Blackberrys not being able to pick up email without constantly being asked to reenter passwords - seems to have happened about a few weeks ago?

 

I can't test it as I don't have a Blackberry, but my studetns have started reporting this issue.

[RabbieBurns]

Will do Rabbie, thanks for the case number, I will post mine up tomorrow when I call (I'm working from home today). I don't remember it being annouced either - and I had noticed that the old dimensions are still in the co-branding pages!

 

thats not actually my case number - the support tech has opened a bug case within MS, and that is the number of the bug.

[adhutton]

Has anyone had any problems with the Use Conversations option in Live@edu?

 

This feature is confusing our users and I would like to switch it off (or default it to not use conversations).

 

Anyone managed to do that - maybe via Powershell?

 

Andrew

[gshaw]

I'm sure I saw a blog post about that somewhere, might have to dig back through my history to see if I can find it...

[RabbieBurns]

had a whole bunch of students come to us today that the live@edu plugin for moodle has stopped working. It takes them to the live@edu login page, but then doesnt take them back to moodle, it presents some moodle page about the liveid not being found or something..

 

Is anynoe else experiencing this issue, or has our moodle admin been messing with things (moodle etc is a diff dept to IT)

 

Finally got a resolution to this problem, and ill post it here just in case anyone was following this thread.

 

It seems our moodle server was upgraded to PHP 5.3 about the time the plugin stopped working. It turns out PHP 5.3 for linux removed the mhash module, which the live@edu plugin requires. This is what caused the problem. PHP 5.3 for windows still includes this module. With a lot of help, we managed to get mhash from the previous php version compiled into PHP 5.3. This should have fixed the problem, (but for some reason the live.azure.com site made us reverify our domain, not sure what happened there)

 

But I must say that throughout our issue, Microsoft were great and provided no end of support, even putting us in touch with the plugin developers directly.

[RabbieBurns]

we allow students to use their own laptops etc on our wireless, however we block all ports on these devices except for http and https

 

They can access their live@edu accounts via the browser, and outlook will also work when it is set to connect via Http.

 

Is there any way to use the Mail Client on a Ipad to connect to live@edu via http ?

[drewp]

Has anyone setup a Shared address space with an outlook live relay to an existing on premises Exchange environment? This is the route we are thinking of going as we are looking at moving pupils to live@edu and keeping our staff accounts on our exchange server.

 

Do you think this is possible or would it be hugely complex for someone who has not installed IML before?!

 

Would be better to setup a subdomin for the live@edu mailboxes to use?

 

for example %email_address%@cloud.%domain_name%

change the existing pupils email addresses to the subdomain and turn of RUS for those accounts

Setup ILM to only sync the pupils accounts to the subdomain registered with live@edu

would ILM then create the existing mailboxes on the on premises exchange server as mail users/contacts?

then remove the pupils exchange mailboxes from the on premises exchange server

 

Any advise on this is would be great!

[sukh]

1. Why are you splitting on-premise with cloud?

2. Why not have all on-premise?

[RabbieBurns]

Has anyone setup a Shared address space with an outlook live relay to an existing on premises Exchange environment? This is the route we are thinking of going as we are looking at moving pupils to live@edu and keeping our staff accounts on our exchange server.

 

Do you think this is possible or would it be hugely complex for someone who has not installed IML before?!

 

Would be better to setup a subdomin for the live@edu mailboxes to use?

 

for example %email_address%@cloud.%domain_name%

change the existing pupils email addresses to the subdomain and turn of RUS for those accounts

Setup ILM to only sync the pupils accounts to the subdomain registered with live@edu

would ILM then create the existing mailboxes on the on premises exchange server as mail users/contacts?

then remove the pupils exchange mailboxes from the on premises exchange server

 

Any advise on this is would be great!

 

We did the second option, except our exchange server only was for staff in the first place so there was no existing accounts to be migrated for students.

 

Created a subdomain for @students.domain.au and kept the exchange server @domain.au. You have to add the existing domain as an accepted domain to the live@edu one

 

What I also did though was set the staff up as windows live users, so they could access the skydrive and interact in the cloud with the students, they simply login with their existing school email address (this becomes their windows live ID) and the good thing is passwords are synced for both staff and students.

 

ILM is a ballache, but I have posted my documentation I made as I struggled through it on here somewhere (in this thread I think) which should give you a good idea of all the problems you might face (with the solutions I found)

[RabbieBurns]

1. Why are you splitting on-premise with cloud?

2. Why not have all on-premise?

 

For us, we opted for the split option as we have 200 staff but 2000 students. It is a lot easier/cheaper to administer / backup etc etc the small staff numbers. We would have had to purchase new hardware etc etc if we wanted to add on our students.

[drewp]

For us, we opted for the split option as we have 200 staff but 2000 students. It is a lot easier/cheaper to administer / backup etc etc the small staff numbers. We would have had to purchase new hardware etc etc if we wanted to add on our students.

 

this is exactually why we are looking at it

[zag]

What is the point of keeping staff on exchange?