jamesbmarshall

Without wanting to sound overly defensive, did you check the planned maintenance schedule, and have you looked at the service health dashboard to see if there were any recorded issues? If there was no scheduled maintenance, and no service-impacting events on the service health dashboard, did you log a call with support? Office 365 does publish its planned maintenance schedule online: https://portal.microsoftonline.com/ServiceStatus/ScheduledMaintenance.aspx

Yes, SharePoint Online. You could create a site, only give permission to staff, and they can upload, create and share documents in it. If they're looking at sharing "privately" (i.e. 1:1) then they could equally upload content to their personal SkyDrive Pro area, and share that content to specific individuals. You don't download Office 365! Every enrollment includes a 30-day trial of the normally-paid-for A3 plan, but you can add the free A2 licences and use as normal.

I don't deal in "might" and "try". Microsoft has not released this functionality for Office 365. Please do not try this at home.

Yes, and yes! The upgrade to the new Office 365 Education (aka the-one-that-looks-like-Exchange-2013, or Wave 15, or "the blue one") is automatic, and you get a notification. The upgrade involves ZERO downtime and your end users do not need to reconfigure anything. You'll get a notification sent to you advising you of your scheduled date. You can postpone once by at least 60 days, after which you'll be rescheduled. This rescheduled date cannot be postponed.

PowerShell Change their UPN and primary SMTP address to reflect the new domain, and add the original (now legacy) domain as an additional email address. If you're synchronizing with AD, forget PowerShell, make the changes there and wait for DirSync to sync the changes (or force a manual sync).

As well as posting in here, I'm assuming you're all being good and logging this as an issue with Microsoft Support too?

Log the IE9 thing with support. Someone, somewhere will have received notification of the upgrade to the new Office 365 so as @AngryTechnician says, you need to find out where those notifications are going. There's a big change in moving from Live@edu to "pre-upgrade Office 365" to the new Office 365, but now that you're on the latest version you should see smoother service upgrades in future.

Once you've upgraded from Live@edu you'll need to deploy DirSync and ADFS just like you've done with the first example. If there are existing accounts at the time of the upgrade that's fine, as long as the data matches up with what's in AD DirSync can "soft match" them on the first sync to tie your AD to WAAD (Windows Azure Active Directory).

Do you have the support reference number for the case where you were informed that it had been cancelled? Please drop it to me as a PM.

I can't agree with this strongly enough! I left school at 18 and went straight into employment as an IT Technician, and then eventually a Network Manager. At the time I thought it was amazing and in truth, of all the jobs I've had since, working in schools is what I miss most but at your stage in life you should be aiming high. You can always "come back" and work in schools, but while you've got the chance, and you're young, see what other work is out there! Being young and working in schools can be a tough gig.

Sync with SkyDrive Pro, via Office 2013, is great on devices that are 1:1, but not so great for shared machines. You can't install Office on a server and use it to sync into SharePoint unfortunately, that's just not how it works. Office 2013 allows users to save straight into their SkyDrive Pro areas, and you can drag and drop files via a browser easily. SkyDrive Pro isn't designed to be a backup for local file storage. Not quite. The formula to use is 10GB + (500MB * number_of_provisioned_users), up to a max of 25TB per tenant. Additional storage is purchasable, at cost. The 7GB SkyDrive Pro storage quota is totally separate, and does not count towards the 25TB.

Managing these upgrades is a very complex process - the way in which we schedule upgrades isn't as straightforward as alphabetical or chronological, there are lots of factors that affect how and when customers get to upgrade. Many customers have already upgraded. The best advice I can give is that you can contact Live@edu support and request your upgrade - you'll then be entered into the upgrade queue to be enabled ASAP. The upgrade process is very popular at the moment so we cannot guarantee when this will happen. If you want the latest, check out: Live@edu

It might be useful to note that Office 365 specifically was recently given IL2 accreditation by the UK Gov't: Microsoft Office 365 Receives G-Cloud IL2 Accreditation from Cabinet Office for Use Across the UK Public Sector - Microsoft UK Government Blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs Microsoft has also signed up to EU Safe Harbor: Safe Harbor - Organization Information

As James has suggested, there's no need to over-complicate this. I'd recommend completing the upgrade to Office 365, adding in your new domain as an additional accepted domain, and then run a simple PowerShell script to change every user's UPN and primary SMTP address to use the new domain suffix. You can, at the same time, set the old domain suffix to be a proxy address to allow your users to continue to receive mail sent to the old addresses; this is useful as it prevents people missing mail and senders getting NDRs unnecessarily.

Are you kidding? It's not often I get to tease, so I take the opportunity when I can! We've been working with some customers on testing PCNS-style functionality with Office 365 but at the moment we have no more information to share publicly. As soon as, and if, I can, I will.

Here's how to find out which version you're using: Am I using Office 365 after the service upgrade? - Support - Office.com

If you set up DirSync you can still log into Office 365 even if your AD is unavailable because Office 365 holds a separate set of credentials for your users; it is only if you deploy AD FS that you become that single point of failure that requires your AD to always be available.

Yet

Windows Azure Active Directory is the identity platform that underpins Office 365; it's an extensible service that allows customers and partners to develop solutions that can hook into the WAAD identities to use with other services. It isn't the same as your traditional AD, hosted in the cloud, but I think you've figured that out! Every existing, and new, Office 365 tenant has WAAD at the core.

Because you've already got users provisioned in Office 365 you'll have to go through a process of "soft matching" those existing accounts with your local AD accounts when you run DirSync for the first time. In order to ensure everything ties up correctly you need to make sure that the UPNs of the existing users in AD match up with the accounts provisioned in Office 365. Adding, or changing a UPN suffix in AD is fairly simple but be aware that you might have internal services that rely on UPN that may break as a result of changing - you should ensure that altering your UPN suffix will not disrupt any other services. In most cases, it's fine. It is possible for users in Office 365 to have a different logon name to their primary SMTP address. Their logon name, i.e. their UPN, will have to match up with what is in the local AD, but you can set the mail attribute to be different. See: List of attributes that are synced to Windows Azure Active Directory and attributes that are written back to the on-premises Active Directory Domain Services. As long as you ensure there are no odd duplicates, and that your local UPNs match up exactly with the corresponding existing users in Office 365 you should be ok. If you want help I'd definitely recommend reaching out to a Microsoft partner. Identity can be a complicated thing to get your head around, and our partners have a wealth of experience and expertise that can help! Before you do anything, I'd strongly recommend you run and digest the results of this tool: Microsoft Office 365 Deployment Readiness Tool - Downloads - Office 365 - Microsoft Office 365 Community.

Just on this point, Office 365 customers who on-boarded before February 27th are referred to as "pre-upgrade Office 365", and those after as the "new Office 365". As it is a service, rather than software, there isn't a specific version attributed to it (i.e. 2010, 2013, etc.), it's always up to date. The waves you hear mentioned occasionally are internal working references but not official public naming conventions. Hopefully that helps clarify - you hear lots of names thrown about referring to the same thing.

Office 365 Service Upgrade Center for Enterprise - Upgrade to Office 365 - Office 365 - Microsoft Office 365 Community There's a good starting point.

What do you mean by the light version?

Must be, must be...

Is Moodle & Office 365 Education integration something you'd be interested in exploring?