altonPM

Is anyone using Office 365's Public Website feature for their school website? I am looking for some example sites to review. Pam

A year later and I believe this is still an issue? Has anyone heard progress on it? Through the course of the year, it was painfully obvious that everyone in Microsoft Education is aware of the problem, especially with the "under 13" accounts in the U.S. They said it was their most requested issue.

Has anyone tried NTFSFix on newer versions of Windows Server? (2012, 2012 R2) It used to be one of my go-to tools but I haven't used it in awhile.

I've learned to use PowerShell, but I also use this great tool called ADManager Plus. It needs to be installed on a server, and it provides a web-based interface for bulk reporting and modifications in AD. It's pretty reasonable in cost.

Has anyone tried using Office 365 for student blogging? The catch is that we are looking for blogs that are public. Our Public site doesn't seem to allow us to allow a blog sub-site.

I am responding in case US users find this thread in the future. In the US, we have pretty strict laws about accounts for students under 13 years old, called COPPA. Office 365 does follow COPPA very closely, and you can also request HIPAA-BAA certification, which is another law that covers data privacy of student information. So, I am very confident in Office 365's "safety", more so than Live@edu or Google Apps. Google is actually the subject of a federal lawsuit in the US regarding this issue.

I really like Windows 8 and Windows 8.1 - we are also an Office 365 school. What I am struggling with is the need to create for students to create a Live ID in order to make use of the start screen. We are a primary school and most of our students are under 14 - the law in the US states that children under 13 cannot create internet accounts without parent permission and, in fact, Microsoft requires a fairly complex process for "approving" children's accounts in the US (I set up an account for my child - it was easy enough to attach that account to my personal account as a parent, but it also required credit card verification). It would be fantastic if our students could use their Office 365 accounts, but Office 365 accounts will not work for this - is has to be a "regular" Microsoft account. Even if we could use an Office 365 account, we do not use Office 365 with students lower than Grade 3 (8 years old), because of the complex password requirements. Additionally, an average student at our school uses several computers a week, depending on whether they are in the computer lab, a classroom, etc. Since we have domain logins, it would be helpful if their "Microsoft Account" could roam with them onto different computers, just like their documents do. It is also difficult for teachers (who do create their own personal Microsoft accounts) to figure out when to use their Microsoft account and when to use their Office 365 account. Apple and Google both offer enterprise management of their IDs. Am I missing something? How are others working around this?

For us, it's only confusing for teachers (who have Surface RT tablets). Students only have Office 365 accounts. I love the Office 365 product, this is just a major barrier to the use of Surface tablets in schools (especially with students under 13). On a personal note, when you do have both Office 365 and personal accounts, I DO love that my Office 365 account is now so separate from my personal Live account - I can actually be signed into both in the same browser!!

To me, this makes it even more confusing, because then they will have 2 different SkyDrive accounts: (1) a personal account at SkyDrive.com; and (2) a school SkyDrive Pro account under Office365. Both with the same credentials!

In the US, it is not legal for students under the age of 13 to create internet accounts without parent permission, unless the accounts are directly managed by a school district. If we are using W8 for younger students, we cannot help them create Microsoft accounts. Office 365 accounts, however, are directly managed by our district. For our staff (who just got Surface RT tablets), it's just confusing - they created their own personal Microsoft accounts, but those are different than their Office 365 accounts. So, two additional accounts in addition to their Active Directory account.

I don't use a proxy server and I am having this issue, as well!

I just got in a small set of ASUS VivoTab's with docks (the regular, not the RT version) with Win 8 home. I upgraded to Win8 Enterprise with no issues; however, it had to do a fresh install and I lost all of the drivers in that process. Thank goodness the USB ports still worked, because the touch screen, keyboard, touch pad, wireless ... nothing else worked. I plugged in an external keyboard and mouse. ASUS doesn't offer their VivoTab drivers via download, so I used another tablet (not yet upgraded to Enterprise), and a downloaded application called DoubleDriver to send the drivers from that tablet to a flash drive. Then, I used the same application to install the drivers on the Enterprise tablet from the flash drive. All of the basics work now, but I notice that the top row of shortcut keys (volume control, etc.) still isn't working. If anyone has ideas for restoring these, please let me know. I do plan to upgrade another tablet to Win 8 Pro and to compare the two. The VivoTab seems like a really nice tablet, by the way!

Karl, can they access the drive if they then type in the FQDN of the server path? For example, my fileshare is at \\depot\students\username . But when I get this error, if they type in manually: \\depot.alton.school.com\students\username , then they can get there. If this is the case, it is related to this thread. I know the title is regarding home folders being deleted, but this permission issue is a symptom of the problem, as well. As far as I know, Microsoft has never fixed it. There is also a discussion on Microsoft TechNet here.

So we are now about a month into full-blown deployment with SCCM 2007. It does have a steep learning curve, as someone else mentioned ... but it is going to save us so much time in the long run! We kept the Win 7 ref image very light, with no apps - and then deployed our base software (Office 2010, Adobe utilities, JRE, Quicktime, SCRATCH, etc.) by collection. Teachers have just come back to school and are pleased with how much faster their machines log in without all the extra apps bloating the OS. We're still working on a few apps, and have some strange glitches, but I would say we have 90% of our users covered with all apps they need at this point. I used SCCM over the weekend to build, capture, and deploy a new Remote Desktop Services Farm (2008R2), this one with apps, into virtual machines ... it was great (and I did it all from home)!

Chiming in here (a year after the thread) ... we found that deploying Windows 7 with SCCM 2007 directly from the CD without building a reference image first caused the drive to be called D: rather than C:. I see another thread about this below (http://www.edugeek.net/forums/o-s-deployment/51200-drive-letter-os-disk-after-osd.html) but wanted to add this here. We've had some luck building a plain vanilla Win 7 reference image (using a virtual machine), then capturing it from there and deploying that. Then, we can still deploy out the applications individually.