funkyfin2000

Another vote for Office 365 here! Add RM Unify over the top with RM's Site Creator tool and it's a winner! I maybe biased due to the 170 schools we are working with but tie this together with the massive amount of other apps and services you can bring in (I am Learning, Classroom Monitor, Accelerated Reader etc etc) its a winner!

That's great - some further info here too: Re: Newsfeed Tab and managing permissions to stop students contributions - Sites and document sharing - Office 365 - Microsoft Office 365 Community Rich

Just my two pennies worth... Don't have any direct experience of WA myself except I know I have 3 schools who heavily invested in it over the past 5 years and are now moving away from it to take up RM Unify and Office 365 as in their words it was just "too clunky", "old" and "very labour intensive" Rich

Oxford Owl is a good one for sure - but no depth of publishers I guess to give you a broad range. I would also like to see OO in Unify with SSO!

So tools in SharePoint that are useful, if you break it down at the top level first -> SkyDrive Pro, Office Web Apps and Sites -> I'd say all of them are very useful and are not a distraction Below that you are talking about functionality that is contained within those areas: Sky Drive Pro -> Allowing you to share and collaborate on files held in it, IOS/Android apps for easier access - the possibility of moving your network files to this area as every user gets 25gb Office Web Apps -> The ease of students/staff to be able to open documents on the fly on any device (inc Ipad!) and edit makes the solution very flexible for those groups of users. You can also collaborate in a single document via office web apps - thinking about peer working/assessment (bit like Google Docs) Sites -> Massive - loads of various web parts/apps that are included within SharePoint Sites allowing you to do all manner of different things. Can't list them all here but Blogs, Wiki's, Document Library's and that's just the built in ones - of course you have access to the Online SharePoint Store to add 3rd party apps as well! In SharePoint you start with a Site Collection and you basically have a "top level" site -> You then create sub sites from there on in if you like (although you could create a whole new site collection if you wanted) You can control the permissions for each area as well so if you set up a governors site for example, you may only want them to access it. Entirely possible. Raw SharePoint is fairly easy to use if you have time, what we use to tie all of this together is RM's Unify system. This allows us to provision from AD in multiple educational cloud services including Office 365. It passes all our groups - students, teachers, non teachers etc in to Office 365 so this helps manage your permissions. Along with that to create our sites we use RM Site Creator which is a fantastic tool allowing you a wizard to basically build and manage all your sites and sub sites. It's incredibly clever and could be worth a look (although you have to have RM Unify to use RM Site Creator) I'll ping you a PM to maybe give you some more thoughts offline. Rich

Hi @SpiderScripts I am involved in an implementation of over 170 schools utilising Office 365 and our main focal point of O365 is to get users using SP2013 Online. In the main schools are starting to use the Sites area as a central repository of resources/communications portal at present rather than a VLE in it's traditional sense. My thoughts would be whether someone like Twynham is moving from SharePoint Server to O365 and look at what they might be doing? If you want to know anything else about what we are doing give us a shout! Rich

Thanks for this - as I thought I understood it. Not ADFS. I also found this article which was helpful: Multiple Logon while open office Document from SharePoint - Steve Chen [MSFT] Sr. Support Escalation Engineer - Site Home - TechNet Blogs Cheers again Rich

Hi All, Can anyone tell me if it's possible to turn off the authentication for opening documents from a Doc Library in Office 365 SharePoint if opened in a local version of Office 2007/2010. I presume thinking about it, Word is getting asked to open the document in the wall environment of Office 365 and therefore doesn't know where that document is without authenticating, but you would think the credentials are cached somewhere as I am already logged in to Office 365? Obviously, downloading the document locally and reuploading would work but is "clunky" Would Office 2013 stop this from happening? Anyone got any thoughts on this? Many thanks, Rich

I've got to be honest Katherine, this further adds to the argument about RM Unify! RM Books is included as a SSO app - therefore all users are automatically logged in and provisioned in to this service if used by RM Unify. It's far more flexible than Kindles as you have minimal management overhead and the books are all wholly educational content with full glossy pictures and aligned correctly for children to read from. Again we have released this with over 50 schools now and they love the flexibility the system brings with the amount of books that are on offer. Quite a number are looking at reducing their spend on a Council schools library service to invest in using RM Books. I believe their are other systems out there from people like MLS etc but they require a large overhead to get started whereas if you don't use RM Unify you can get started with RM Books for free to try it out. Any questions give us a shout Rich

Yup. I can demo it although slightly tricky to complete as it will start building your structure in a site collection. How can I be of service?

Just about what I was about to say - SharePoint 2013 is a no brainer. It's exactly where we are taking our schools and combine it with RM Site Creator and you are on to a winner. Would you mind if I PM'ed you @kaphc

I am based in Entrust in Staffs and we are bringing just over 170 schools (majority from RM's LP to RM Unify with O365 integration) It's going extremely well - schools are loving the brand new interface (SSO to Cloud based services) and then absolutely loving the O365 SharePoint/SkyDrive side of things. We offer training in this element and transition schools over and we have had nothing but positive comments - mainly because technology has changed and 6 years on from RM LP being developed things are so much easier and more user friendly If you have any specific questions, let me know I can probably help. Rich

LOL! Cheers dude Good spot - Monday morning head! Edited.

Yup, I concur - Office 2003 is not supported in O365. Extended support finishes in April 2014 same as XP. I also recommend IE10 or IE11 to use full functionality. It's exactly what we are advising our schools at present.

As I've already said James, you have always been helpful with my request for support as I took O365 out to over 170 schools! Quick, prompt and incredibly knowledgeable. You should be very proud of your 3 years in the Live@edu/O365 field Enjoy the next set of challenges

Yeah, your right I have a positive view as I am rolling it out across schools, but it's also right to give a balanced view. We are early days, with only 50 schools, but having previously had RM's Learning Platform we have continued to have the buy in to RM Unify and Office 365 and are now moving schools over from previous LP solutions where any kind of development seems to have stopped! The reasons they are moving are in my OP. Unify has really started to grow like Books has - with loads more apps that our schools have already or want to use as well. I would certainly like to here some other views as well - I network with a number other colleagues around the country but it would be great to have some on the ground feedback from elsewhere. Rich

Hi @speckytecky, I can speak on this from a large scale implementation stance. We are currently implementing RM Unify (branded LaunchPad365 by us) with just over 170 schools (and that number is growing as schools love it!) So far we have about 50 schools of varying types (Primary/Secondary/Special) on line and actively using it. So far the comments we have had tend be down the lines of: * Much easier than our previous slow and clunky VLE * Very good for teachers to get to grips with as so easy to use in terms of how it looks, multi device/device agnostic - always gives you the same look and feel across these devices * Single Sign On - cuts down so much time when we start to join in a number of other services we already have in schools, EG Education City, Classroom Monitor etc To give a balanced view, I guess the only negativity we have had is around product features - schools wanting more- * Want to be able to group tiles and label there own groups of tiles - eg in to Subject or Class name etc (I believe this will come!) * Be able to provision in to the service from MIS rather than AD (or a mixture of both) (I hope it will come!) Alongside our implementation of Unify we have a number of apps bolted in with automatic account creation and SSO - RM Books (the EBook service that has seriously grown over the last year - 99% of our schools have dived straight in with it with tons of ideas for engaging with reluctant readers) and alongside that Microsoft Office 365. With the implementation of MS Office 365 we also have RM's Site Creator which is just immense! It does need some improvements which we are feeding back to RM at present but as a tool to integrate to Office 365 SharePoint it's simple, easy and been received so well by our schools. It builds and structures your SharePoint structure eg. school intranet in a matter of minutes (as long as you have all your pictures and have thought about your structure of course!) and then can be used to add content back in to those sites once the structure is built. All in a simple easy to get to grips with wizard and UI. How many teachers/students have ever got to grips with SharePoint? Probably not many as they say it's far to clunky or complicated - we have Primary Schools using it right now and loving how easy this tool makes Office 365 SharePoint. I highly recommend it or taking a look at it. With our implementation we have built in our own training for schools - I'll be honest, training on Unify/RM Books takes about half a morning as it's just obvious how you use it. After that it's all about Site Creator (which also takes about 10mins!) and then the rest of it is supporting them creating content within Office 365. This neat package is going down very well with our schools so far! If you would like to talk to me direct about more experiences then don't hesitate to drop me a PM or take a search on here for more RM Unify feedback. Cheers Rich

Exactly - from a management perspective I think some admin training is probably worth it. @Novatronix did ours in Summer. 1 day Admin training, 3 days SharePoint and 1 day Public Spaces. Not sure about RM - they certainly didn't in the summer when we asked - in fact took training from @Novatronix the same as us as I understand

TBH Mark, I would say more indepth O365 training for yourself would probably be beneficial if the school does decide to go whole hog O365 as it gives you that depth of knowledge if you need it (depending on how well you retain it of course ) SC will take A LOT of grind out of it!

Going to say don't avoid it - its a fab tool and it's come on SO much since SharePoint2007 in RM's Kaleidos and SP2010. It's far more user friendly and great for staff/students to get on with now - including things like the web apps and Sky Drive. Trying to create large structures and etc is where it gets more complicated using raw SP and that's where SC comes in handy as it does it all for you. I think what we liked is, RM's LP was obviously hosted by them and cut down to make it as easy as possible to use, Office 365 is more user friendly anyway to start with and at the same time, if we want to use the more complex areas of it then it's there if we need. Rich

Hi All, Has anyone else tried using sharing of documents within Sky Drive Pro in Office 365 Education A2 plan? We have, at several schools, tried to share documents that then I would expect to see fairly quickly (maybe not instantaneously but within a few minutes) in another shared users "Shared documents with me" area. It appears that even though the permissions are changed immediatly and the email link that comes to that shared with user works, actually seeing the file physically in the "Share documents with me" area is somewhat lacking. Sometimes the file does appear after about 2-3 hours, sometimes it doesn't appear at all. Sporadic you might say and next to useless! :@ I believe this is linked to the crawler service, but with a bit of research I found the following: Files shared with me not showing in skydrive - Microsoft Community It appears MS know about this and it's been an issue for well over a year - pretty poor if this is the case. Can anyone else test or have any experience of this they can enlighten me with? Rich

Yeah, not really a like for like replacement at all. SC is a wizard to help build elements of Kaleidos to make it far more user friendly that using raw SPoint (if we think of it in old terms!)

Others have answered a lot of the questions there, but Staff and Students are in seperate GALS as I understand, like I say though we are yet to really dig in to Exchange with our schools. Aliasing accounts in Office 365 will be the way forward for those email addreses. Site Creator is designed to be just that - simple - get your structure set up in SharePoint and then use it again to add further elements to it for your content. Believe me, after having SP2007 in RM's LP our schools are very pleased with site creator as it makes it so much easier to get to grips with building your online collaborative sites for teachers/students. That said, if you want to use the real nitty gritty of SP, Site Creator still allows you to do this, think of it as a wizard on top that you can choose to use if you wish, or not if you don't. EDIT - Not sure if you meant Unify was too simple or Site Creator - Unify is also simple and very easy to use - it's not a VLE though of course (nor is Office 365 in that way) Hope that helps. Rich

My thoughts are yes, they would need creating in AD as a user - that then feeds Unify which then feeds O365. Unless you were going to attach those mail boxes to another user already created. Unify will distiguish users from your AD - it will know which schools are in the Student Group and which ones are in the Teacher Group. Their username in AD you describe will then become their email address@domain Hmmm, yeah, Site Creator is an additional extra which as previously mentioned we are paying extra for as well in our contract with schools but it's a joy to use. Out at a school using it today and it's working very well to build the SP structure. All done and dusted in an hour today and now adding content and customising look and feel. Rich

If using Unify - dead easy and self explanatory! All your accounts will be auto created anyway..... manual accounts you need to be careful with - they will need to be run through Unify because if you created say a manual account for BobtheBuilder - as soon as he goes the Microsoft Portal and puts his email address in, it will fire him to the Unify login page.... Are you going to use SharePoint? If so, have you bought Site Creator with it? If so, again you don't really require much SharePoint additional knowledge unless you are going to do some very advanced stuff. Hope that helps - fire away if you need more questions answering.