Office 365 for education - available now!

[gshaw]

Access mostly. In reality I'd want to completely replace Desktop Office for the majority of users as a way of reducing costs.

I don't think I'd want to jump ship to a relatively new product that is so far behind Google which has seen years of development in web based collaborative apps.

 

I'll probably sign up for a test site and check it out though.

 

It's not really Microsoft's strategy to kill the desktop apps completely as desktop Office is still a lot more powerful than the web app... the ability to seamlessly move between the two is what I'm after

[edutech4schools]

Think Grumbldook is on the right lines which is one reason I needed to set up 365 without it taking over our domain / email. I would like to pick the best parts from both and merge the two together.

[garethEds]

Can anyone get their hands on the document that outlines the SSO of Office 365 with Shibboleth? I have to get it through a partner and we haven't got one.

 

JUst want to read what's going on and show the LEA>

 

Cheers

 

GJE

[edutech4schools]

“

The university selected Office 365 over Google Apps because it gives us a robust enterprise-class platform for developing a radical new approach to collaboration and communication that goes far beyond email”

 

Just seen this on the 365 website. Are they taking the P***. So they tested all the 365 apps (docs, calendar) against gmail. Hmmm that's fair.

[nadeem]

Can anyone get their hands on the document that outlines the SSO of Office 365 with Shibboleth? I have to get it through a partner and we haven't got one.

 

JUst want to read what's going on and show the LEA>

 

Cheers

 

GJE

 

I think Shibboleth support is coming soon and isn't available right now (or least it wasn't a few weeks ago)

[pritchardavid]

whats the file size limit for the students and staff with this for the free package? Im thinking to could technically replace our fileserver, haven't got to worry about backups either. Only an thought at the moment, really need to know the size limit. Edited June 30, 2012 by pritchardavid

[SYNACK]

Think its 500mb, you'd still want backups though, clouds can blow away and all that.

[pritchardavid]

bugger, that's too small! think some of our students have over 1gb I think, we haven't got any limits set atm.

[SYNACK]

We have teachers with 100GB+, was thinking of trying to map it as a separate drive for globally available, especially with the send to option. Depending on the auth pass-through options I was also thinking junction/mount points to auto map it as a subfolder in my docs.

[CyberNerd]

Think its 500mb, you'd still want backups though, clouds can blow away and all that.

 

 

Thats one of the advantages of having an intermediate app between the client and the cloud storage.

The Google Drive the app syncs the contents of the users homedirectory on the local server to the Google app cloud, so you get the best of both worlds - local server storage and cloud access.

+ 5GB compared to the measly 500Mb MS offer.

[gshaw]

MS will have to up the 500MB as it looks very lame compared to the Google offering. Is anyone buying the MS line that the Sharepoint feature can replace the VLE

 

Personally I see 365 / GApps as a supplementary service, a productivity tool but not a complete learning system in its own right.

Edited June 30, 2012 by gshaw

[tj2419]

Could this be used as a schools primary email system. E.g. Run office 365 as the main email system for staff?

 

Could this be set up so that staff use it as their normal email system and students use it for theirs but the students can only email when on site? Or just email other students and not see staff emails?

 

If any of that makes sense to someone ;P

Thanks

[SYNACK]

Could this be used as a schools primary email system. E.g. Run office 365 as the main email system for staff?

 

Could this be set up so that staff use it as their normal email system and students use it for theirs but the students can only email when on site? Or just email other students and not see staff emails?

 

If any of that makes sense to someone ;P

Thanks

 

Yes, yes, yes and no plus yes.

 

You would have issues trying to restrict it to onsite only access as it is cloud based but it is basicly just a big Exchange setup, you can mess with the address lists so the teachers emails are not shown and you can even use Outlook 2010 as a client for the teachers as local apps always best cloudy rubbish on user experience and speed.

[tj2419]

Yes, yes, yes and no plus yes.

 

You would have issues trying to restrict it to onsite only access as it is cloud based but it is basicly just a big Exchange setup, you can mess with the address lists so the teachers emails are not shown and you can even use Outlook 2010 as a client for the teachers as local apps always best cloudy rubbish on user experience and speed.

 

Cool. We are currently testing exchange 2010 but this could save us a fair amount of time and money plus the extra features. We currently use live @edu for onsite only and they can only send to other school inboxes. But for staff being used for external emails and 25gb mailboxes would be a massive advantage.

[SYNACK]

Cool. We are currently testing exchange 2010 but this could save us a fair amount of time and money plus the extra features. We currently use live @edu for onsite only and they can only send to other school inboxes. But for staff being used for external emails and 25gb mailboxes would be a massive advantage.

 

You can also run split site if you need to with the teachers stuff hosted locally on an Exchange 2010 server and the rest handled by the external service. This can be handy if you want to give the teachers more space/speed and local access incase the internet goes down. Initially this is how we would be running it because our teachers, despite best efforts at training them still throw 10-20MB attachments around to all teachers and our internet link would not take kindly to ten or twenty teachers banging down the latest cute kitten powerpoint at once where as locally this is no problem at all. Even with a 100mbit link I'd still feel more comfortable with staff stuff internal as another advantage internal sensitive docs never traverse the net (unless checked remotely) which can be preferable.

[PiqueABoo]

Despite the increasingly woeful state of PKI I don't rate the net traversal as much of a threat, and if they need more than 25GB then I think "tough" is a perfectly reasonable response - it's not that long ago when it was 1/3 of a max Standard database size and if they all start doing that you're probably doomed e.g. 100 x 25GB locally? Not in my neighborhood - thank you. I agree that link speed and staff naivete is something to consider.

 

Visibility drives me up the wall: They're either saying "Oh no! Students must not see staff because they might get sent some evil mail!" or "Oh no! Staff must not see students because they'll accidently select and send them the wrong mail by accident!". The only good news in this area is that Microsoft did fix the age-old problem of not being able to hook Outlook up to a hidden account - I can connect Outlook if I'm hidden, but I'm not sure if that works for connecting to a second mailbox yet (it didn't a few months ago). On a related note Automapping in the cloud hasn't worked reliably for me, so I take care to turn that off and add secondary mailboxes to Outlook the old way.

 

One of the key problems for me with Live@Edu/Office365 is that it's largely a one way deal - much easier to put your stuff in than get it out (although AIUI the hybrid online+onprem stuff lets you move from online->onprem) - exporting to PST with Outlook doesn't exactly scale past an occasional handful of mailboxes. MS have also picked a good area for their charging in archiving.

Edited July 1, 2012 by PiqueABoo

[Edu-IT]

Despite the increasingly woeful state of PKI I don't rate the net traversal as much of a threat, and if they need more than 25GB then I think "tough" is a perfectly reasonable response - it's not that long ago when it was 1/3 of a max Standard database size and if they all start doing that you're probably doomed e.g. 100 x 25GB locally? Not in my neighborhood - thank you. I agree that link speed and staff naivete is something to consider.

 

Visibility drives me up the wall: They're either saying "Oh no! Students must not see staff because they might get sent some evil mail!" or "Oh no! Staff must not see students because they'll accidently select and send them the wrong mail by accident!". The only good news in this area is that Microsoft did fix the age-old problem of not being able to hook Outlook up to a hidden account - I can connect Outlook if I'm hidden, but I'm not sure if that works for connecting to a second mailbox yet (it didn't a few months ago). On a related note Automapping in the cloud hasn't worked reliably for me, so I take care to turn that off and add secondary mailboxes to Outlook the old way.

 

One of the key problems for me with Live@Edu/Office365 is that it's largely a one way deal - much easy to put your stuff in than get it out (although AIUI the hybrid online+onprem stuff lets you move from online->onprem) - exporting to PST with Outlook doesn't exactly scale past an occasional handful of mailboxes. MS have also picked a good area for their charging in archiving.

I'm pretty sure secondary hidden accounts are still a nuisance to connect to - and have to be unhidden.

[tj2419]

Anyone looking at using this as their schools email system? Our existing one is woeful.

 

We are currently testing exchange 2010 but this may allow us to save a lot of money and time.

[Blue_Cookeh]

Anyone looking at using this as their schools email system? Our existing one is woeful.

 

We are currently testing exchange 2010 but this may allow us to save a lot of money and time.

 

I moved our school from our county's aging mail system to Live@Edu last Easter and it's been great for us, use of email and shared calendars has risen greatly in our school. I set staff up to use Outlook on their laptops rather than the web interface and everyone seems to get along with it. I'm looking forward to migrating to the new Office 365.

 

One thing I did do before moving everyone to Live@Edu was make my own default retention policies so that mail wasn't moved around or deleted automatically, which might have confused some staff.

[zag]

Anyone looking at using this as their schools email system? Our existing one is woeful.

 

We are currently testing exchange 2010 but this may allow us to save a lot of money and time.

 

We moved last year to live@edu. Very happy with it.

[Gardinho]

Will the end user experience anything different other than the additional apps? We have live@edu here, and it is excellent. I just wouldn't want to sign up to something if the interface changes without discussing it with SLT.

 

Would it be possible to sign up, migrate and disable everything so we can test and add to our environment as and when we choose to?

 

Sorry if I haven't explained this well!

 

Many thanks,

[zag]

Will the end user experience anything different other than the additional apps? We have live@edu here, and it is excellent. I just wouldn't want to sign up to something if the interface changes without discussing it with SLT.

 

Would it be possible to sign up, migrate and disable everything so we can test and add to our environment as and when we choose to?

 

Sorry if I haven't explained this well!

 

Many thanks,

 

The email part is exactly the same from what I can gather. Its just exchange online.

 

If your talking about the office apps then they look pretty much the same but I would think it would just be used to compliment Microsoft office locally not replace it.

[PiqueABoo]

It's quite hard to pin things down, but my current(!) theory is: However you get to Office365 (via one of the migration phases or a brand new one) you can get a variety of different licences for free and the licence type you assign to a given user determines what feature they get. If you just want users to have the same-as-Live@Edu e-mail then you can assign Exchange Online (Plan 1) licences to them, and for testing sharepoint+lync at your leisure assign Microsoft Office 365 (Plan A2) to test accounts until you've got it all working & shiny, at which point you can upgrade all your users to A2.

 

I haven't checked every last detail for devils yet, but as above the user e-mail experience is effectively identical. You lose any branding you've added to [email protected]. no more "St Trinians" and titchy logos, just the generic Office365 one. No SkyDrive etc. links in the banner, you get Home, Outlook & Team Site links instead.

[jamesbmarshall]

I think Shibboleth support is coming soon and isn't available right now (or least it wasn't a few weeks ago)

 

It's available now: Use Shibboleth Identity Provider to implement single sign-on

[InterwebsGuy]

Has anyone migrated from Google Apps to Live@Edu/Office365?

 

I am going to be looking at doing this - probably wouldn't bother moving over the students existing mailboxes (give them new empty ones), but we would need to do the staff ones and I get the feeling it will be a painful experience!