funkyfin2000

Yup, it's all browser based and SSO to 3rd party cloud services - such as things like Education City, Office 365, Google Apps, RM Books, J2E, Classroom Monitor, Planet Sherston etc etc All the Apps already in are on their website with loads more in the pipeline - What Applications are in RM Unify? | RM Shop Works really well on the Ipad (but remember your 3rd party service you link too much be supported on IOS - good example is anything Flash based (espresso/education city for example) wouldn't work but Microsoft have done a lot of work to get Office365 working well on IOS. Rich

As long as it has a browser (IE 9 and above we recommend, Chome, Firefox, Safari and internet connection, I don't see why not! Not tested as such - we have tested on Android and IOS of course and all works well!

Fair enough - to be fair you don't need to touch RM if you want to try out RM Unify - you can have a play with the Free version (OK no SSO but gives you a flavour of how it fits together)

Hi All, Just thought I would say, we started to use the RM Site Creator tool (utilised through RM Unify) for Office365 yesterday (it came out fully last week to purchase) and it's pretty immense! We found it to be very easy to use (great for us to use with our O365 schools) and it built our sites in Office365 with ease (and fairly quickly) It will customise all of your themes and look and feel of sites from the Site Collection (and it will even design multiple site collections in one tenancy!) Once it's done with all that - it sets up permissions (generic ones, but pulls them all through from RM Unify - creating Domain Groups) You can then manipulate these as you see fit if you want to adjust things. It also adds some default content to the pages for you - you delete this easily if it's not for you and set up the page as you want. If that wasn't enough (and we thought the tool was going to be a one hit wander) it then allows you to go back in to it and start adding content (team sites, pages etc etc) It will also ask you to set up permissions for these sites as well!. We had a play with some backend O365 stuff to see if it would break the tool if we went back in to use it to add content and nope, it worked perfectly out the box! All I have to say is well done RM! Can't wait for any further improvements to the service, such as allowing it to add even more content and manipulate more permissions and maybe allowing you to use the tool to create your public site in O365 as well! It's certainly a much better option for our schools to use than sitting their creating O365 from scratch and it taking weeks before they finally loose interest! This allows them to get up and running quickly, with the more intuitive feel of O365 against what we had previously (SharePoint2007) this will only help with user adoption and usage! Just need Microsoft to offer Parent accounts now! Come on Microsoft sort it out (along with some of the other bizarre things in O365!) Rich

Quick update to this - RM Books has changes a lot and is getting better and better (RM are certainly not letting it just sit as a product) and the IOS and Android app now syncs with your RM account (across proxied servers too) and works really well! We role it out to 170 schools next year! Can't wait! Rich

I would advocate RM Books - we are rolling it out to 170 schools next term..... it's come on a long way since its inception in September.....I still think there are some downfalls, they need to encourage the big publishers to put on common books that kids are reading as one of the areas. Schools we have shown the service too think it looks brilliant and are really up for trying a service like this and are prepared to spend money on it (you don't have too remember - there's a 1000 free classics!) They have also just updated the IOS and Android app which now syncs (inc proxied connections on both platforms) to your RM Unify/RM Books account! It's fab! I wouldn't be getting rid of physical books though! That's not the idea - it's to compliment books and allow you as a school to more flexible for the end user. The evidence also suggests from the literacy trust that using physical and e-books together gives better outputs and results! If you want to ask any questions about how we get on with our 170 schools drop me a line! Rich

Another vote for RM Unify here.... It does all your provisioning straight from AD (or CSV) and provisions users in to Office365 and variety of other 3rd party apps! If you couple this with RM Site Creator that creates and builds, customises and sets up general permissions in Office365 you are on to a winner! Take a look - we are rolling it out to 170 schools from next term!

Dos this not sound the same as RM Unify?

Right then, manage to get sat down and time to construct a reply, had our 3rd day of Office365 training today and just got the kids to bed so hopefully my thoughts make sense! We are a support company that has had over 300 schools on RM's Learning Platform product for the last 5 years or so in Staffs. It's taken a lot of hard press but at the same time has also dealt some cracking rewards for those schools (why do you always hear about the negative but never the positive eh?) We worked hard to make RM's Learning Platform a success through my small team (and some help from RM that we paid for) We recently tendered and selected RM Unify, Office365 and RM's Site Creator tool to move us forward from the LP. I think this was the best decision (ask yourself is the traditional learning platform dieing?) and it gives our schools the best tools to work with going forward. Migration is a tricky area - we are encouraging our schools to look at what they did previously and learn from this before creating a new structure and set up in Office 365. We have RM's Site Creator and today we had a real play with it now it's a live product (came out last week I think) and it is AWESOME! Having done 3 days of raw Office365 training through Novatronix (which has been excellent) we then used the site creator tool to match up our knowledge and see what it did in O365. I have to say it's brilliant, it does the majority of the work for you. It creates and builds all your sites, attaches the permissions and brands and customises the look and feel. After that you can use it to go back and build all your content inside the sites. Tried to break it and muck about in raw sharepoint afterwards and then use it and it dealt with all our changes including template copying extremely well. We will encourage our schools to use this tool to "start again" in affect and then look to manually move any files and folders (dead easy through Explorer view in RM LP) and drag and drop in to O365 SharePoint or use Explorer view again. I think schools will be pleased with this due to the ease of use of the Site Creator tool! It does ALL the leg work for you! Right what about Account Management - slightly complicated for us as our schools are continuing to be provisioned by their MIS in to the LP and then in to RM Unify for the moment, but to be fair, even if they were AD provisioned in to RM Unify (which some of our new schools will be) the same scenario will apply: Office 365 gets all the provisioned accounts created inside it from RM Unify - they are then grouped in to your AD Containers - IE Teachers, Non Teachers, Students, Administrator etc.... These are created as Domain Groups in SharePoint. RM Site Creator takes these and applies some default permissions across the sites it creates. IE Staff Room has Full Access for Staff etc. You can go and edit them afterwards directly in O365 if you wish. We need to fully understand what permissions it has set, but actually adding content and pages afterwards you get the option in the RM Site Creator tool to set up the Read, Read/Write or Full Access for Students/Teachers etc at the time of creating it! Very impressive! There won't be much work for our schools to do apart from add "apps" or a few "web parts" to the page, although again the Site Creator tool does add some default stuff in automatically! Certainly much easier - granted we need to put this into practice with 170 schools from September and that will be the acid test, but so far very impressed. We look to design training for this over summer and if anyone else wants to access this they are welcome! Get in touch! We also have about 60 websites running in the RM LP public sites area and our next training will be looking at how they are created and used in O365. Very different I hear Any other questions, drop me a line! Rich

Got to say RM Unify is awesome - OK it didn't have many apps when it was released but it takes time to build these and they are coming thick and fast now! Certainly a lot showing on the Trello board they use to showcase up and coming features (let me know if you need the link) This also lets you vote for which ones you think are the best too! Great way to inform them! Today we can Office365 Site Creator for the first time since it's release last week, got to say it was awesome! Talk about taking the time and hassle out of setting up sites and permissions and content in O365! Your right though - Have an account provisioned in RM Unify and it creates all your accounts in the associated 3rd party and then manages them. With Office365 when trying to log in directly with a RM Unify provisioned account it will pass you back to log in to RM Unify before then returning you to Office365. DirSync might be good, but it doesn't start to tie other 3rd party services you have in the cloud together and you don't get to use Site Creator to manipulate Sharepoint! RM gets a lot of hard press sometimes but I think this new stuff is very well thought out and works! Rich

Only just seen this! Will construct a reply and come back to you! I can certainly add my two pence worth!

Hi Helen, I work for a large new company in the UK who were once an LA! We developed over 60 school websites in SharePoint 2007 very cheaply (for schools) and had really good results. One day set up and the school managed it afterwards, as they had the skills in house as they were using a SharePoint based Learning Platform. In reality, they have just used my service for support when they needed changes as SP2007 was a tad unwieldly to use in the real world. Moving forward we will be moving those 60 schools websites to Office365 Public Sites which will give much better looking websites and also much more intuitive to update. If you would like any further information, or example 2007 sites we have live at the moment, drop me a PM! Rich

Cheers all for the prompt replies! From Michael's link it appears O365 email has a default retention of 2 years!

Hi All, Can anyone tell me what the Office 365 Email (Exchange) Back Up and Recovery Options are? (Likely using the A2 plan) Is there any at all? Many thanks, Rich

Hi There, Has anyone got any resources on how to use and template Office365 Public Sites as a school website? Many thanks in advance.

Just touching on the SSO bit of information and the Single Point of Failure with ADFS - it might be worth considering RM Unify (Discover: RM Unify) which allows you single sign on to a multitude of Cloud Education Service Providers, but also Google Apps and/or Office365 Suite. It also integrates with your own AD (Vanilla etc) Rich

We are about to take on Office365 with over 170 schools in Staffs. They are coming from RM's Learning Platform and taking on the new product from RM - RM Unify (Was launched at BETT) Check their website for details if interested. RM Unify gives single sign on to multiple different educational cloud base services (and is growing) One of the first ones that it works with is Office 365. All users provisioned from your AD through to RM Unify and then in to Office 365 (or Google Apps!) Going to be a big process and a large project but we are taking on all the options in Office365 for our schools including Exchange/Sharepoint etc. Will let you know how we get on, but so far the signs are good! It's interesting because Learning Platforms in themselves are clearly starting (have they already?) to die, we had a very good implementation in Staffs and still have about 90,000 hits and over 15k individual users a month to RM's LP, but clearly schools are looking at different things now (including their budgets!) and moving away from the traditional LP's. Office365 fits the gap very nicely along with the single sign on methodology used in RM Unify - I hope we are on to a winner! Rich PS - I have no experience of OpenHive as none of our schools use it in Staffs - we did see it as part of a demo brief a year or so ago and it looked similiar to what we had in RM's LP - IE SharePoint based. Maybe the identity management was more advanced.

so 7gb space then for clarification for A2 plan for education?

We saw it over a year ago now when as an LA we were looking for LP trends and wins/learns to inform an upcoming tender and wasn't overly impressed at all. Just looked like a VLE from the ark. That said, it may well have improved now as not seen it recently. I believe one of our schools out of 400 is a customer.

Hi All, Can I just add to this as well as I know one of the posters here is Staffordshire based. We will have siginificant overlapping between SLN2 (RM's Learning Platform Service) and RM Unify (LaunchPad365 as we have branded) built into our contract. This will be fully explained in the presentations we are running. We will also be discussing the current facts around migration from one service to the other. Quick note on pricing as well - Staffordshire pricing includes a large degree of value add over and above the standard offering from RM. Overall, our schools are really excited about the potential for RM Unify (LP365) going forward and I think it really does offer next generation technology incorporating the growth in 1:1 and BYOD strategies. Cheers Rich

Id like to know this too! If you find out do update the thread! Taa

I understand 2013 comes out in O365 in February but I could be wrong!? Anyone care to update? Alex?

PM sent.

RM Learning Platform Uniservity Openhive.net etc etc

It's not Christmas! The upgrade at Christmas is called 11.03. Lots of improvements to Parent views etc. More information here: Coming Soon to the RM Learning Platform!