jamesbmarshall

Good question - don't know off the top of my head, will have to go away and ask!

Quick terminology update! OneDrive (formerly SkyDrive) = the consumer, that is to say public, offering. The one you get with your Microsoft account, that anyone can sign up for and over which you have no control. OneDrive for Business (formerly SkyDrive Pro) = the commercial, that is to say education, offering. The one that you get with your school Office 365 account and over which you have full control. It is possible to have an Office 365 account that is also associated with a Microsoft Account and could therefore have both (a bit like signing up for a Microsoft Account with your Gmail address) but in simple terms OneDrive for Business is the one that comes with Office 365, and is the one you should look for.

Late to this, but yes, OneDrive for Business is 1TB per user. Shared storage starts at 10GB per tenant, incremented by 500GB per user. There used to be a 25TB cap on that, but I believe that's changed - would need to confirm. If you need more storage than is provisioned by (10GB + (500MB * number of users)) then you can buy more. It's pretty sweet.

I'm confused... OVS-ES and EES are based on your FTE staff count, not device count? If you buy devices that ship with a Windows 8.1 SKU rather than Pro, you can still upgrade them to Windows 8.1 Pro or Enterprise as long as you're covered for Windows via your OVS-ES or EES agreements courtesy of Software Assurance. Have I missed the point?

Some useful stuff here, particularly if you virtualised your desktops or want to roll this out to shared machines... Office 365 shared computer activation - Welcome to the US SMB&D TS2 Team Blog - Site Home - TechNet Blogs Overview of shared computer activation for Office 365 ProPlus

I am not accusing anyone of anything here, that's not my point. My point is only that I don't believe it is within the license terms to take a personal device, built with an OEM image of Windows, and re-image it with anything other than the original OEM image, except by purchasing an upgrade, volume licensing agreement, full packaged product, etc. This comes under "re-imaging rights", which are only granted with a volume licence agreement, AFAIK. Since, as a home user, it's unlikely you'll have a VL agreement with Microsoft my interpretation is that your only option is to use the OEM recovery media for the device, or to buy a full packaged product version of Windows. Therefore, it's probably inappropriate to be discussing ways to enable this. (I'm not a licensing expert - but I spend my days in the world of volume licensing. If you want to be certain, speak to the supplier)

I don't want to drag this thread down into the boring and complex world of Microsoft licensing; however, if you don't have a VL you can't use the VL media to re-install Windows onto your personal device - no matter how much the OEM image sucks. Obviously, as this thread suggests, there are ways around this. It's just that those ways are probably not legal, and therefore EduGeek is possibly not the best place to discuss them.

I'm just going to leave this here... Microsoft Volume Licensing Brief - Reimaging Licensed Microsoft Software by Using Volume Licensing Media Pretty sure you're only allowed to use the OEM supplied image without a volume licensing agreement, and I know you all like being above board here.

Have you logged a support request?

I've just asked so we'll see, but I think it's fair to assume that STANDARDWOFFPACK_STUDENT which is today's Plan A2 for Students will stay as STANDARDWOFFPACK_STUDENT but will be known as Plan E1 for Students. I'll let you know once I have an answer either way.

Not that I'm aware of, but I'll ask to be sure.

Slow news day... but next month some of the offer names for Office 365 Education are changing to make it easier to understand. Read the blog post for a handy table: Changes to Office 365 Offer Names

I've been using RichCopy for a long time now... Free Utility: RichCopy, an Advanced Alternative to RoboCopy

https://onedrive.live.com/redir?resid=AB50B6D45CA7D61B!67094&authkey=!AG6CePBZO2nhwdw&ithint=file%2cpdf - you're correct. See page 6.

You're talking about the convergence of two different architectures here - DOS/9x and NT.

This. No need to panic, but of course upgrading to Windows 8.1 is a highly commendable thing to do...

Check again! I believe the pricing is somewhere in the region of $6 per staff member per year for education, but you should speak to a licensing re-seller for a quote.

Yes - it's not optimal in that scenario right now, I'm pretty sure it'll get better as time moves on. It's quite a tough challenge to solve when you deconstruct it. Up to 1TB of files in the cloud... all of which are fully accessible any time, on any shared device, without the hassle of having to fully sync, without suffering the potential bottlenecks of rural broadband or outages, whilst keeping full version history of the files, and sharing, collaboration and enterprise social features... I wouldn't want to have to solve it! Right now I still think there's a place for a file server in schools. It won't always be that way, but right now I think it is. Random longshot thought: a bunch of well connected schools, like an academy group, could club together for a StorSimple appliance to provide file storage to users without the burden of having to have a huge datacentre to host it. Spread the cost between the participant schools. They scale up cheaply with Azure storage, so get some of the cloud benefit (although none of the SharePoint Online/OneDrive for Business/Yammer benefits), but also have all the native integration, drive mapping, etc. that you'd expect from a file server. Depends on how important having that drive mapping is in the long-run... :/

Here's mine! (I actually just wrote up what I use for work on a daily basis, in case anyone's interested...)

I know this might seem obvious, but worth checking... Have you worked with Microsoft Support to see if there is a fix for this behaviour?

Windows To Go is specifically the feature for building a Windows image onto a USB 3.0 memory stick. The sticks cost a little more because they have to meet certain read/write and throughput conditions to ensure a decent performance. In theory there's nothing to stop you using a micro SD card for the Windows To Go build - but it'd fail, I think, because it's not certified. Also, is a micro SD card any better suited to the education environment than a chunky memory stick? A VHD image of Windows doesn't have to be "Windows To Go", it's just a... VHD of a Windows machine? If you don't want it to be portable (i.e. on physical hardware) then implement VDI for BYOD devices perhaps? (Although the upfront costs of providing the server infrastructure would mean a longer time before you saw a good saving unless you already had the infrastructure in place) Kids are rough, and hanging a memory stick off a laptop increases the risk that someone will snap it off but I don't think the risk is necessarily higher than kids damaging fixed PCs (punching in empty drive bay blanks, sticking gum everywhere, graffiti, screwing with mice, damaging keyboards, flicking the PSU to 110V mode, etc.) It'd obviously have to be a judgement call on a case by case basis; i.e. if your kids are bad, it's not for you. Anyway, it's just a suggestion of a different way to potentially save some money. i.e. a single PC = 3 or 4 Windows To Go sticks.

Top ICT Money Saving Tips - Microsoft UK Schools blog - Site Home - MSDN Blogs This is from quite a while ago, so it won't all be accurate or necessarily relevant but good food for thought. - Cutting printing - Virtualisation (or even moving some workloads to cloud IaaS) - Outsourcing services like mail, IM, to cloud service providers like Office 365 (others are available, but I don't think they're as good ) - Power management - Outsource major print jobs? Rather than run off letters to parents and stuff internally, surely there's a "Moo" equivalent for printing letters? (I have no idea if there is, but there's a business idea if there isn't) - You can get, and I have no idea what their ROI is, fancy power blocks that detect when a PC switches off and will turn off everything else plugged into it (i.e. monitors). Granted a flat screen sips power in standby, hence the uncertainty about ROI, but if you scale it up across hundreds of computers it might add up. Switch out fat-client PCs in areas like an LRC or open access suits with a VDI or remote desktop solution with lower-power thin client terminals? Quite a big project, but could reduce power usage over time. ... even look at BYOD with something like Windows To Go where the student or teacher brings their own x86 laptop and you provide them with a Windows To Go memory stick. I won't explain what WTG is but you can read up on it: Windows To Go Demo | James Marshall - it's pretty awesome, and might mean you could reduce the number of fixed PCs you have over time.

Rather than force them to come back, why not look at managing them with Windows Intune in conjunction with SCCM? That way as long as they're online you can make they get the updates they need.

What are the problems with the access over VPN?

Nope. If you want them to continue to access their email you can switch them to the Alumni plan which will give them mailbox access. The Office 365 Account, and the Microsoft Account are two totally separate systems - there's no way to move an Exchange Online mailbox automatically to an Outlook.com one, for example.