Upgrading from Live@edu to Office 365?

[zag]

Ok so we've been using Live@edu for a year, working great. Used by 1000 people every day.

 

How do I upgrade to Office 365?

 

Is there any risk in services by doing that?

 

Can it be done manually or do I have to wait for an automatic upgrade? I tried loggin into the Live@edu service manager but cant see any options to upgrade.

[Sylv3r]

You'll need to go through this blog, following the checklists and request that you wish to upgrade. You need to have various things in place ready such as ADFS if you wish to sync with AD. We currently use FIM and will have to move away from that to get Office 365 working.

 

I've also read regarding the password lengths etc having changed for Office 365 which is also slowing my progress down with the upgrade - we will probably look to upgrade next holidays after a bit more research on my behalf.

 

Live@edu Upgrade to Office 365 for education (English) - Live@Edu Upgrade to Office 365 for education - Office 365 - Microsoft Office 365 Community

[plexer]

You also need to have an invitation from MS to upgrade your tenant.

 

Ben

[zag]

I'm so confused after reading that Guide.

 

- Do we have to change the login link to Office 365?

- How do we get an "invite"?

- Do users have to sign up again with the new password requirements (all our users have 6 character passwords)

[KyleEdmundHayes]

Hi,

 

If you are ready to upgrade (and don't want to wait for an invite) you need to email Live@edu support. They will enable your account for upgrade and then a link should appear in the management portal.

[zag]

Just gave them a ring and a very nice Indian man explained to me that the upgrades will happen in November and December based on the Hosting racks one at a time.

 

I'm now in 2 minds whether to ask for an invite now or to wait. Caution tells me to wait but then we loose control of when it will happen.

 

I've setup the new CName redirect so hopefully we are ready to go. Itching to use hosted sharepoint.

 

Has anyone else migrated?

[staylor1972]

Hi Guys

 

Has anyone been through the upgrade yet? just looking over the documentation to see what hell i'm going to go through!!! We set up using OLsync, PCNS and ILM. Was a pain to get up and running initally but its worked brilliantly for the last 2 years!!! Just wondering if anyones upgraded with these parts in place.

 

we also use Shibboleth to authenticate some of our library services as well. Is anyone using Shibboleth to authenticate??

 

Steve

[zag]

Hi Guys

 

Has anyone been through the upgrade yet? just looking over the documentation to see what hell i'm going to go through!!! We set up using OLsync, PCNS and ILM. Was a pain to get up and running initally but its worked brilliantly for the last 2 years!!! Just wondering if anyones upgraded with these parts in place.

 

we also use Shibboleth to authenticate some of our library services as well. Is anyone using Shibboleth to authenticate??

 

Steve

 

That sounds really complicated. We deliberately didn't go the SSO path after looking at how hard it used to be and the difficulty of migrating to office 365 in the future.

 

This is a proper balls up of a migration by the way. So far I've found out:

 

- We loose Skydrive for all new accounts

- We have to change our URL from the one people are used to

- New users have to enter totally different minimum password requirements

- The migration documentation while comprehensive is soooooooo complicated. Even reading their idea of an email you should send out to users makes me think they don't live on the same planet as normal people!

[british_government]

Hi Guys

 

Has anyone been through the upgrade yet? just looking over the documentation to see what hell i'm going to go through!!! We set up using OLsync, PCNS and ILM. Was a pain to get up and running initally but its worked brilliantly for the last 2 years!!! Just wondering if anyones upgraded with these parts in place.

 

we also use Shibboleth to authenticate some of our library services as well. Is anyone using Shibboleth to authenticate??

 

Steve

 

 

We went through the upgrade, our live@edu accounts were all manually created and luckily for us not in use, as when we setup dirsync on office365 we had duplicate accounts and all kinds of conflicts and issues.

 

We don't use SSO or shiboleth so I cant help there I am afraid, but having used both the upgrade to 365 is worth it in the long run, even if you are tearing your hair out for a few weeks.

[staylor1972]

Hi Zag thanks for the quick reply.

 

just looking through the documentation and your right its far too complicated. we've just had a new intake of students who are just getting to grips with there new account names and passwords and to tell them in a couple of weeks that they need to go and put another password in on a different website will confuse them even more!!

 

i can see a nice queue forming at the helpdesk me thinks - if i can get it working! I'm quite amazed that thers not being a bigger out cry at how they've changed it.

 

maybe its just me and i've over complicated it all using ILM and olsync!

[staylor1972]

I dont use SSO at the moment or Shibboleth just use the PCNS and ILM so the student passwords are the same for all there accounts.

 

were looking at Shibboleth to do the authentication after the upgrade process - how tricky was this to setup at your end british_government?

[Jollity]

One of my domains has been upgrade to Office 365 (though that domain is not actually in use). I have just received notification that we are allowed to initiate upgrade on the other domain.

 

Has anyone used the user self password change site (https://eduupgrade.office365.com) during an upgrade? I think this may be new as I did not notice any reference to it in the documentation when I did the first upgrade. If you have used this, can you verify whether this description is accurate? Apparently after setting their password with the tool, the user is immediately prompted to change it again when they log in for the first time.

 

Here is a gotcha I noticed after the first upgrade. After I had used the Office 365 admin page to reset the password on an account, when I went to the Office 365 login page, I was presented with my saved account name (next to the head and shoulders silhouette). However if I clicked on this, it would attempt to log me into Live@Edu and hit an error. In order to log in to Office 365 it was necessary to click on "Sign in with a different user ID" at the bottom of the page and re-enter my username and password. Has anyone else seen this behaviour?

[vikpaw]

I just completed my upgrade. We don't use live@ much, and it was all manually set up, as a backup. We will in time move to sync with AD and single sign on etc. We're also planning to have a shared namespace set up, so our onsite email is duplicated to O365. In actual fact we'll do it the other way around, so new mail hits the cloud then relays to us.

 

Anyway, i went through the wizard on the eduadmin.live.com portal and followed the steps. stage 1 took overnight, the others i did within a few hours, but i was busy so it could have been quicker actually.

 

My first problem was that my custom domain pointer was wrong it was sending http://mail. via a CNAME record to the live@edu location. It looked like i could login, but it got stuck in a redirect loop and if i was lucky timed out. i had to go to the mail.office365.com address where i could sign out and try again. I've updated the CNAME record now and it works fine again.

 

With regards password update, i went to the eduupgrade page and it wasn't as per link above. i just changed it to what i wanted and it stayed as that. didn't get prompted to change it again. one user who did have problems and didn't successfully do the upgrade was prompted again, but it didn't work. i just went into the admin console and changed it for him and then he went straight to the office365 page and logged in and changed it when requested. there was no need to do an upgrade as far as i can see.

 

If you didn't know and have yet to migrate, then Microsoft have put aside some money to help get schools moved over before the 2013 deadline. You can contact Expertise in Identity & Access Management : Oxford Computer Group for details. When i asked it seemed it was only 50% of the cost so it might be too costly. Also, it's only to help with the upgrade process, which i've now done, so i guess it's only worthwhile if you've already set up some kind of sync to AD or other complexity that it would be worth the cost. I wasn't worried about downtime or any other integration.

 

Now it's all done, i am going to look into setting up a sharepoint site, it says you can make a public one, i'm hoping we can also make a private one too. it's a different admin area and i've not read up that bit yet.

 

It's possible to upgrade the service subscription to a higher level for FREE, has anyone done this? I'm happy to go up to the best free one, but haven't looked into what the differences are yet.

[Michael]

Interesting thread this. I have three schools running Live@Edu, but what baffles me is the migration of users and mailboxes are all automated, yet the user is required to change their password. Why is this Microsoft? Why not make the whole process transparent to the end user? And why can't users still login via outlook.com ? Edited October 9, 2012 by Michael

[zag]

Interesting thread this. I have three schools running Live@Edu, but what baffles me is the migration of users and mailboxes are all automated, yet the user is required to change their password. Why is this Microsoft? Why not make the whole process transparent to the end user? And why can't users still login via outlook.com ?

 

+1 Exactly the questions I want to know.

[vikpaw]

+1 Exactly the questions I want to know.

 

Interesting thread this. I have three schools running Live@Edu, but what baffles me is the migration of users and mailboxes are all automated, yet the user is required to change their password. Why is this Microsoft? Why not make the whole process transparent to the end user? And why can't users still login via outlook.com ?

 

I believe it's partly due to the segregation of different aspects, namely the live/msn/skydrive becoming personal, and the O365/email being managed. This forces the user to accept in a way, and re-register in effect.

 

i guess the outlook.com thing is also related, that is for live services, not the microsoft online services, so i guess they split the servers / services .

 

I guess now, it means that they can be logged into the work (Office365), and home (Hotmail) at the same time. w00t

[jamesbmarshall]

Interesting thread this. I have three schools running Live@Edu, but what baffles me is the migration of users and mailboxes are all automated, yet the user is required to change their password. Why is this Microsoft? Why not make the whole process transparent to the end user? And why can't users still login via outlook.com ?

 

Drop me a PM and we can talk about the upgrade process in more detail if you like. The upgrade splits out the mailbox from the other Microsoft services. Existing users will have their Microsoft Accounts, and their Office 365 accounts going forward. At the moment passwords have to be reset because we can't copy them between the two services but resetting is a one-time process and you can bypass this entirely by moving straight to AD FS or Shibboleth as this negates the need to store any credentials in Office 365; users just authenticate against your local AD.

[zag]

Finally some clear and concise instructions

 

Live@edu Upgrade Center

 

@jamesbmarshall how will this effect our outlook desktop client users?

Edited October 11, 2012 by zag

[jamesbmarshall]

@jamesbmarshall how will this effect our outlook desktop client users?

 

Depends - how are they currently configured? The answer could be as simple as there is no change. Are you going to move to AD FS 2.0? Which version of Outlook are you running?

 

Mailboxes don't move as part of the upgrade so server names shouldn't really change, but the auth details might. If a user changes their password to something different, or you deploy single sign-on, etc.

[Michael]

Drop me a PM and we can talk about the upgrade process in more detail if you like. The upgrade splits out the mailbox from the other Microsoft services. Existing users will have their Microsoft Accounts, and their Office 365 accounts going forward. At the moment passwords have to be reset because we can't copy them between the two services but resetting is a one-time process and you can bypass this entirely by moving straight to AD FS or Shibboleth as this negates the need to store any credentials in Office 365; users just authenticate against your local AD.

 

Thanks for replying to my query. After reading Zag's link, it answers a lot of the questions and at least we have plenty of time to plan ahead with a migration. What I'm still concerned about, is Microsoft are aiming Live@Edu or Office 365 to both Primary, Secondary and higher education establishments, yet a lot of these changes are aimed at more mature students or adults who are perfectly capable of changing/updating a password.

It's a lot more difficult to get a Primary school child to update or change their password and I welcome you to go to any school in the UK and you'll see the same results. They're only children at the end of the day.

 

How would a single sign-on work, if say the format of AD users is mjones, but their e-mail starts m.jones@domain, but with an alias mjones or matthew.jones (for example) associated with it. Many thanks!

[zag]

Depends - how are they currently configured? The answer could be as simple as there is no change. Are you going to move to AD FS 2.0? Which version of Outlook are you running?

 

Mailboxes don't move as part of the upgrade so server names shouldn't really change, but the auth details might. If a user changes their password to something different, or you deploy single sign-on, etc.

 

Good news that the server names don't change. We are running Outlook 2010 desktop client for all our teachers.

 

Will their clients just stop running when we are migrated due to the need to change password or do they stay the same?

[jamesbmarshall]

Will their clients just stop running when we are migrated due to the need to change password or do they stay the same?

 

Unless you move to federation, nobody will be able to log in via any protocol until they've reset their password. Mail flow inbound is not affected.

[zag]

Unless you move to federation, nobody will be able to log in via any protocol until they've reset their password. Mail flow inbound is not affected.

 

Thanks, makes sense.

 

One more obvious question... When does the upgrade happen? I'd rather wait a while rather than go though all that mid term.

[jamesbmarshall]

One more obvious question... When does the upgrade happen? I'd rather wait a while rather than go though all that mid term.

 

Currently it can happen whenever you like. There'll be a point in time when you'll be scheduled at which time you'll be able to pull forward whenever you like, but only push back by a limited window.

 

As for waiting a while - I'd say do it ASAP rather than during a holiday. It's not as painful as you think!

[staylor1972]

Hi Guys

Were slowly getting our heads round the migration process - were going down the ADFS rounte implmenting single sign-on - not bothering with Shibboleth.

Can anyone tell me what the limitations are with using Dirsync as appose to using FIM.