Chromebooks and Office365

[fiza]

Hi,

 

We are looking into Chromebooks as replacements for our aging Laptops. We are part of London Grid for Learning and as such all our students have School email addresses through which they get access to Skydrive and Microsoft Office Live . Would using a Chromebook push us towards Google Apps or would the Chromebook quite happily work with MS Office Live?

[CyberNerd]

Hi,

 

We are looking into Chromebooks as replacements for our aging Laptops. We are part of London Grid for Learning and as such all our students have School email addresses through which they get access to Skydrive and Microsoft Office Live . Would using a Chromebook push us towards Google Apps or would the Chromebook quite happily work with MS Office Live?

 

In all honesty Google Apps is so much better than Office 365 anyway!

Google Apps integrates seamlessly with Windows, Android, Apples and Chromebooks - so it would be a pretty obvious choice!

[fiza]

In all honesty Google Apps is so much better than Office 365 anyway!

Google Apps integrates seamlessly with Windows, Android, Apples and Chromebooks - so it would be a pretty obvious choice!

 

Its not that we dont want to use Google Apps its just that the students already have email addresses supplied by LGFL that link into MS Office Live. As far as I know to use Google Apps you would need to register with a Gmail account?? We dont want the students to have another email address to use. They need to continue using the one issued by LGFL.

[fiza]

Is anyone out there actually using Chromebooks in School?

[CyberNerd]

Is anyone out there actually using Chromebooks in School?

 

yes, we have a few.

[SYNACK]

Hi,

 

We are looking into Chromebooks as replacements for our aging Laptops. We are part of London Grid for Learning and as such all our students have School email addresses through which they get access to Skydrive and Microsoft Office Live . Would using a Chromebook push us towards Google Apps or would the Chromebook quite happily work with MS Office Live?

 

It'll push, the whole OS is a big ad/snare to push you in to Googles online stuff.

 

You'd be much better off with some W8 tablets with the Atom chips, basically netbooks but also tablets and will play very nicely with Live@edu/365. Better hardware too.

Edited December 14, 2012 by SYNACK

[fiza]

yes, we have a few.

 

Do you have the management console to go with these? Does each user have to log in to the Chromebook with a Google Account?

 

 

It'll push, the whole OS is a big ad/snare to push you in to Googles online stuff.

 

You'd be much better off with some W8 tablets with the Atom chips, basically netbooks but also tablets and will play very nicely with Live@edu/365. Better hardware too.

 

It was the minimal maintenance side that attracted my boss and the fact they boot in 8 seconds.

[SYNACK]

It was the minimal maintenance side that attracted my boss and the fact they boot in 8 seconds.

 

SSDs in W8 tabs, 20 - 30 s boot, management side is still limited though.

[fiza]

SSDs in W8 tabs, 20 - 30 s boot, management side is still limited though.

 

Price difference is quite a factor. New Samsung Chromebook wifi is only £229. Cheapest W8 tablet?

[CyberNerd]

Do you have the management console to go with these? Does each user have to log in to the Chromebook with a Google Account?

If they were ours we'd use the management console but we don't manage them at all because they are all user owned devices, they just login with their school account.

Its one of the reasons why a google apps domain is a good idea - with windows you can just manage windows (and OSX at a push) with a google apps domain you get more flexibility as you can manage android, IOS and chromebooks and it all integrates with AD. But like @SYNACK says - you might be better off paying the higher price for W8 if you can't get the decent tools.

Edited December 14, 2012 by CyberNerd

[fiza]

Its one of the reasons why a google apps domain is a good idea - with windows you can just manage windows (and OSX at a push) with a google apps domain you get more flexibility.

 

What is a Google Apps Domain?

[CyberNerd]

Google Apps for Education

[fiza]

Google Apps for Education

 

I guess with a Chromebook you cant get away from Google Apps. We would just want to get on the net and then use our existing Office Live Apps without having to log in using a Google Account. The kids already have email accounts with MS through LGFL so I dont want to be creating new Google accounts for all of them.

[CyberNerd]

I guess with a Chromebook you cant get away from Google Apps. We would just want to get on the net and then use our existing Office Live Apps without having to log in using a Google Account. The kids already have email accounts with MS through LGFL so I dont want to be creating new Google accounts for all of them.

 

I guess. live/365 is a bad choice for anything other than MS.

[fiza]

I guess. live/365 is a bad choice for anything other than MS.

 

I had no say. It was all done and dusted before I started working here.

[Netman]

Using a guest account is possible it would seem - would this work for your situation? Browse as a guest - Chrome OS Help. No personal experience with this though...

[fiza]

Using a guest account is possible it would seem - would this work for your situation? Browse as a guest - Chrome OS Help. No personal experience with this though...

 

That sounds good. Only problem I can see is that browsing history is deleted as soon as you log out. But then again you are not logging in, in theory, so it is anonymous anyway.

[SPM]

I had no say. It was all done and dusted before I started working here.

 

I don't think you will have any problem here using Gmail and Google apps for domains and combining the two sets of email accounts into one. I administered Google Apps for Domains for a business and it integrates very well with pretty well everything. Gmail domain management is very flexible, and you can try it out along with Google Docs and Google sites using your existing Windows laptops before committing to Chromebooks. You should speak to a Google education representative about this.

 

The setup for email we had in my former employer is as follows:

1) We registered an Internet domain name and set up Google domain account and Gmail new accounts for all users.

2) We asked out ISP (Demon Internet) to forward all emails they received addressed to the old domain to our new domain.

3) We set up Google accounts to send out emails masquerading as being sent from the old email domain (a confirmation email must be sent from the old account to allow this).

 

Voila - we can send and receive email as if they were from the old email address. The same account will handle emails addressed to the new email address. If you are happy to simply use the new domain address for all new emails while receiving emails addressed to the old and the new address, simply omit step 3.

 

An even simpler way is to simply transfer your existing domain name to somebody like uk2.net who can provide a DNS server with the facility for user management of DNS records and set the DNS Mail Exchange Records on their DNS server to point at Google's mail servers. You can also transfer existing domain name to an ISP who is willing to set your DNS settings for you to point at Google's mail servers. This way you only have a single email domain - the one you already have - only it works with your Gmail accounts, your existing email server is Google's email server instead of your ISP's SMTP server.

 

Quite frankly you are not tied into Google in any way if you use Chromebooks. The only thing you have to do is to set up a Google Domain and use that rather than your local Windows AD server for authentication, what is more, you can synchronize tour Google account login with Windows AD login if you want

The Google Enterprise Expert Blog: How to sync Active Directory passwords with Google Apps. You can just as easily use Windows PCs to access your Google accounts and domains.

 

In reality though Office 365 is rubbish compared to Google Docs and expensive. I can't see why anyone would use it if they aren't committed to MS Office legacy file format or third party file format compatibility reasons.

 

Read Google Apps Help

Note however that Google has special domain services for education, which may be better suited to education and is likely to be cheaper

Google Apps for Education

[CyberNerd]

 

 

In reality though Office 365 is rubbish compared to Google Docs and expensive. I can't see why anyone would use it if they aren't committed to MS Office legacy file format or third party file format compatibility reasons.

 

Google docs does even work with the legacy file formats. If you add the google apps plugin for MS Office - the files are instantly uploaded as binary files to Google apps when the file is changed in MSOffice.

 

Note however that Google has special domain services for education, which may be better suited to education and is likely to be cheaper

Google Apps for Education

 

It is actually free for education - the same service that costs business £30 per user per year.

Some quite large firms are using it now. Jurnalists at the guardian, who you might expect to be using traditional office apps, have been using Google apps for over three years

Edited December 19, 2012 by CyberNerd

[HTCPCP]

we have a couple of Chromebooks at work, and use the guest account on there instead of using school accounts. We have been told that the management system for chromebooks isn't available in the UK a few weeks ago, and call centre staff aren't hugely clued up about them.

One thing to think about is how you are going to use your proxies. On the guest account you have to tick a box every time you sign in, and i would think the same would be for every other user...

[SPM]

You can still set up and use Google Apps for domains with individual Chromebooks or Windows PCs or Macs. I believe you need buy Chromebooks through Google Education or Google Business sales in order to have them preconfigured to allow forced centralised management of the Chromebook devices - for example to force certain options on or off, and to force installation or block installation of certain extensions etc. I believe you can get Chromebooks bought on the consumer market to join a management domain, but it is easier if you buy Chromebooks through Education or Business sales.

[SPM]

A Google Apps Domain is way of linking a number of Google accounts to an Internet domain name for the purposes of Email and Google Sites etc. and doing administration on them collectively. For example if your school was Rydell High and you registered the domain rydellhigh.edu, you would have email accounts [email protected] for all your students, and you could set up internal web sites like class-5-assignments.rydellhigh.edu which students in class-5 can be granted access to after logging into their rydell high Google accounts.

[zag]

Just been looking at this myself and it seems Office 365 works well once you login as guest.

 

I'm not sure how good a solution it is really as I would love for the students to be able to log in and connect to skydrive ect automatically.

 

Frustrating as I've found the chromebooks very, very nice and cheap as well. No windows machines come close that I can see.