Live@Edu please can you help?

[joshjacklin]

Hello and good evening I am wondering if you can help me please.

 

Me and my fellow collegue have been tasked with setting up live@edu by our boss at the moment we have our emails coming through to a ubuntu email box which as far as I am aware just reroutes the emails to the relevent email boxes on our curriculum server I apologise if this is a rather vague description but it is setup and maintained by a 3rd party company and so I do not know too much about it.

 

What do we need to do to get it setup?

 

Thank you

 

Josh.

[PiqueABoo]

More info required for a clueful response:

 

What's the scale i.e. number of mailboxes (staff + students)?

What do people use to access their e-mail? Some web-browser-based client? Outlook? Something else (what)?

If it's not pure web-based then do the mail clients use POP3 or IMAP?

When are you thinking of doing it for real?

[TheMinister]

Also you may want to consider whether you're going to host some of the mailboxes on-premise or all in the 'cloud'.

[Tricky_Dicky]

Hi Josh,

 

Setting up Live@Edu isn't as complicated as it sounds. First things first though, who do you want email accounts for? Is it just staff or Students as well? If it's just staff and you aren't in to big a school then the simplest way to set it up is to enroll your domain and setup a test domain.

 

To do this, go to the live@edu site and follow the sign up procedure, they will give you an MX record to put in your DNS. I would use something like test.yourdomain.com to begin with so you can get a feel for it, it is then easy yo add your main domain as part of the same system later on.

 

Once you have the domain configured add users. Simplest way of doing this is a CSV upload through the main user interface, but this does have some down sides. 1) You can't synchronize passwords in this way 2) To add new people you have to manually add them. However like I said earlier if you don't have to many people this isn't so bad. I did it with 50 members of staff and it was pretty straight forward.

 

Once you have got used to how the systems work just add your main domain, upload the users and change your main MX record and you are good to go. It doesn't matter what client people use to connect as Live@Edu works perfectly with Outlook (2003,2007 & 2010), Mail for Mac or just through the web interface. As far as the computers are concerned it is just a normal Exchange server and will treat it accordingly.

 

Oh one more thing, don't forget to add the autodiscover to the DNS so things can be set up easier.

 

Any problems, just call Microsoft directly. There support has been superb for me.

 

Good luck

Rich

[Gibbo]

We registered a free co.cc account rather than use our existing .org.uk account.

 

Then it was a simple process of putting the settings from the .co.cc domain into Live Edu. If you get stuck, contact Microsoft and they'll have a rep call you back within a few hours.

 

Then just get an Excel CSV together of usernames and passwords and import it in.

 

I can't believe how easy it was, how helpful Microsoft were, and how it cost nothing to have a whole-school mail system!

[zag]

It takes about 30mins to setup, its not a big job

 

We also used a new domain name .co.uk for ours which made it much easier.

[joshjacklin]

Thank you for your replys, at the moment we have an in house system which uses pop and smtp so if i was to manually setup a user I point the pop to 192.168.0.5 and the smtp to 192.168.0.5 and as long as they enter the correct credentials it downloads the email, our system means that currently we cannot use email externally. The aim is to be able to use the email externally, and they want the inboxes to be stored in the "cloud". The number of users would be around 500-600 all staff and students I would imagine. As far as time frames they want it doing as soon as possible naturally!

 

How do I migrate the current inboxes to the cloud because it doesnt matter how good this new system is if the admin users cant access there previous emails then in the enviornment I work in it will be considered rubbish.

 

I will hopefully be migrating all of the staff and all of the students to this system, and realistically I would like the user management to be as easy as possible and this csv sounds like a good idea but how manageable will it be?

 

Thank you,

 

Josh

[Tricky_Dicky]

When you say it downloads the emails, what do you mean? Does it download the emails to a pst file of some kind for each user? Do the children do this as well or do they have a web interface to use?

 

With that amount of users I would look at OLsync if you can, if not, the CSV upload will do just fine.

[zag]

To migrate just load the old inbox as well as the new live@edu into outlook. Then drag and drop the emails across.

 

I'm doing this for all our teachers and admin staff in a few weeks time, should be quite quick to do I think.

 

Students we are not bothering about as its the end of the school year soon. Our old exchange webmail will stay up for a term in case anyone needs anything from it.

[joshjacklin]

I do not know much about the mail server as its managed by a company of which we pay for support but if I explain things it might make a bit more sense, when I arrived we had 2 isolated domains, an admin domain and a curriculum domain and we had a bridge between the two.

the admin users use outlook and connect to the email server the outlook mail profiles are stored in there home areas so they can be backed up.

 

When I would setup an account I would just point it to the mailserver 192.168.0.5 via pop and smtp and then I would type in the users credentials and test to ensure it works and thats it.

 

Whilst the curriculum staff and students use thunderbird and when there accounts are created in active directory the mail addresses and inboxes are automatically created and there mailboxes are stored in a shared folder on the network. When launched the application simply asks for the correct credentials and fetches there emails.

 

we recently did a domain merger but the email system stayed the same and thats how has been ever since and as time are changing the users and staff especially want to be able to access there emails from home and as budgets are tighter than a glamour models suitcase I know this kind of seems irrelevant however hopefully it gives you a better insight into what I am working with.

 

I just need to take this above and spank it onto live at edu, and management want us to do it yesterday.

[zag]

If you can get all the old email data into pst files then just do that and put it somewhere.

 

Then setup Live@edu and attach the pst files to outlook or thunderbird at a later date when its all settled down.

[joshjacklin]

Ok cool thank you very much, I now understand the concept it does not seem too bad, my manager kindly set up the initial account so literally I can log on into the service management portal but I have no idea of where I am going or what I am doing. Could some one please guide me, I hate feeling like a noob at these things but I have to start somewhere. Thank you!

 

Josh.

[joshjacklin]

Ok I have just looked up the domain and our schools domain is already in there and the MX record appears to pointing to our email server, as further as I can tell what do I need to do next? If we just start with the users that have outlook, what do I need to copy or do?

[zag]

Depends if you are doing an in place upgrade or changing your domain name.

 

Once you've decided that and changed the MX record its a simple case of importing the users with a CSV.

[joshjacklin]

What data am I putting into the CSV is it just there email addresses?

[adhutton]

What data am I putting into the CSV is it just there email addresses?

 

Check your Live@Edu admin screens - there is an import template you need to use, so you get it in the correct format.

 

A

[zag]

There is a sample csv in the help for importing users.

 

Just download that and enter your own details from your MIS system.

 

It will tell you if anything is wrong.

[joshjacklin]

Thank you to everyone who has contributed, one last question if I migrate my users to this can they still use there internal email system whilst im trying this out cause the last thing I would want is it to go belly up and get burnt at the stake.

 

Thank you

 

Josh.

[zag]

Only if you put it on a separate domain name (thats what I did and made the changover really easy)

 

We went from a .sch.uk to a .co.uk

[PiqueABoo]

at the moment we have an in house system which uses pop and smtp.

 

Reason I originally asked about this is that normal folk will want all their existing mail transferred to Live@Edu. If Thunderbird is set to download all mail from the POP3 server, then you have a problem - perhaps some Thunderbird expert will know better, but I'm not aware of a simple way to get mail stored in some Thunderbird format transferred to Live@Edu mailboxes, and that's 500-600 times over. I wouldn't want to do that if you were using Outlook and had PST files (which can be manually transferred slowly, one at a time via a copy of Outlook 2007 or later, preferably with PST Import rather than dragging & dropping).

 

Sorry, but I genuinely can't think of a good way past this.

 

 

There support has been superb for me.

 

You must have asked easy questions or something. They've had me metaphorically banging my head on the wall a few times - having to explain how some not-that-unusual areas of e-mail work to someone who is supposed to be supporting the [bleeping] product doesn't make me happy. Nor does being told "we don't support X" (which for this "X" was nonsense) when they get stuck. It's always been slow for anything lacking a simple boiler-plate answer, but to date support has been much better once escalated to a more local engineer.

 

--

 

Setting up a basic functioning Live@Edu tenancy isn't hard. Getting current Live@Edu to do some advanced things can be interesting - probably the office365 movement thing, but a lot of the documentation doesn't fit the reality in front of you properly at the moment. Nor for that matter do some of the links in the ECP e.g. I can click a link to get an AdminAuditing report but it will be empty because that's turned off and the cmdlet to turn it on isn't there etc. And has anyone seen that FOPE yet?

[joshjacklin]

With Live@Edu is there a way of setting it up so I can get it running and use my email address as the guninea pig and then when I want to add the other users I just add them and deploy it?

[robk]

With Live@Edu is there a way of setting it up so I can get it running and use my email address as the guninea pig and then when I want to add the other users I just add them and deploy it?

 

Once you change MX records All of your domain email goes to microsoft's systems, so you can't change some addresses and not others.

 

You can however set up all your user accounts, and upload email before you swap over.

 

I strongly suggest looking if you can get external IMAP support from your current mail server, as you could then use the microsoft migrtation tool for all existing email.

[zag]

Or do as I said earlier and register a new domain name for emails, then you can test it out.

[joshjacklin]

I would like to say thank you to everyone who has contributed to this thread, I have got the users mailboxes up using CSV files which was a butt load of work but its done literally I have one thing leaft to do and I am wondering if anyone has done it yet? Have your organised your mailboxes into departments e.g. Admin, Teachers, Students if so how do you do it using Exchange online?

[PiqueABoo]

The way to test this fully without disturbing your current e-mail is to go buy a cheap domain from somewhere that gives you sufficient access to the DNS to create the (new style) MS verification TXT record , MX records etc. You add that to your tenancy as an accepted domain, create a mailbox account for that new domain name and start mailing etc. Remove associated mailboxes and that accepted domain later.

 

Organise mailboxes where? You can't do that in most places you can see them, it's just one big flat A-Z GAL, or rather the first 500 if you have more users. What you can usefully do is set a mailbox custom attribute when creating accounts (but not with the GUI import) to indicate whether it's staff, student, etc. You can then use that to make dynamic distribution groups, run powershell commands to do things to just one set of user type etc. There's a bit of a learning curve here, but I think it's worth getting to grips with for future convenience.