Microsoft Education in the Cloud

If you are planning to deploy the Microsoft Online Services Directory Synchronization tool (DirSync) for synchronization from Active Directory to Office 365, then we have some important news for you.

There’s a 32-bit DirSync client AND a 64-bit DirSync client available for download at the Office 365 Portal!

Download the Directory Synchronization tool (DirSync) from the Office 365 Portal

The 64-bit version of DirSync supports Windows Server 2008 x64 or Windows Server 2008 R2 Standard/Enterprise operating systems.

If you’ve already deployed the 32-bit version DirSync, there is no need to install the new client. “The 64-bit version of the directory synchronization tool shares exact functional parity with the existing 32-bit software.”

For additional information, please see the Office 365 Wiki article, Directory Synchronization tool 64-bit support.

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Thanks for joining us today!

Zion Brewer

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If you are an Exchange Online or Outlook Live tenant administrator, then you can access the Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE) Administration Center via a hyperlink in the Exchange Control Panel. And with a few additional steps, you can login directly to the FOPE Admin Center.

Accessing the FOPE Admin Center from the Exchange Control Panel

1. Sign in to the Exchange Control Panel as an Administrator
2. Click Mail Control (left side) then click the hyperlink underneath Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (right side), e.g. “Configure IP safelisting, perimeter message tracing, and e-mail policies.”

After about 30 minutes of inactivity, the FOPE Admin Center will timeout.

When you click the “Configure IP safelisting, perimeter message tracing, and e-mail policies” hyperlink in the Exchange Control Panel, you may receive the an error saying, “We are sorry but your session has expired.” 

So, how do you login again to the FOPE Admin Center?

You could sign out of the Exchange Control Panel and sign in again. Then, click Mail Control and click “Configure IP safelisting, perimeter message tracing, and e-mail policies.” But, you may need to close all of your browser windows.

If you have as many open browser windows and tabs as I do, then this could become a major interruption. “Should I save this tab or that tab? What’s the password for the firewall’s web GUI? Should I save a Draft in OWA or send this email before closing all the browser windows?”

I’ve gone on too long…you get the idea.

Instead, why not sign in directly to the FOPE Admin Center? You can stay logged in to the Exchange Control Panel, leave open your browser windows and tabs, and simply sign in again with your user name and password.

Sign in directly to the FOPE Admin Center for the first time

1. Browse to https://admin.messaging.microsoft.com/
2. On the “Sign in” page, click the “Need your password?” link
3. Enter your Administrator’s User Principal Name (UPN) or Windows Live ID, e.g. admin@fabrikam.onmicrosoft.com (Office 365) or admin@live.contoso.edu (Live@edu), and click Send
4. Login to your Administrator’s Inbox, open the Password Change Confirmation email and follow the link in the body of the message
5. On the “Set your new password” page, enter User Name, New Password and Confirm new Password
6. Go to https://admin.messaging.microsoft.com/ and login with User Name and new Password 

Steps 1 and 2	Step 3

Step 4

Step 5	Step 6

Forefront Online Protection for Exchange – Administration Center

At this point, you can go directly to the FOPE Administration Center at https://admin.messaging.microsoft.com/

…

So, how do you pronounce FOPE?

In my previous article, How do YOU pronounce FOPE? An Introduction, I discussed some of the key features of Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE) and invited you to explore additional resources:

• TechNet Edge – FOPE
• TechNet Library – Forefront Online Protection for Exchange
• FOPE 11.1 Administration Center User Guide
• Spam Filtering and Message Hygiene

And, hopefully, you’ve had an opportunity to sign in to the FOPE Administration Center via the hyperlink in the Exchange Control Panel or by entering your user name and password at https://admin.messaging.microsoft.com/.

Okay, I didn’t spell it out. The truth is that there isn’t a right or wrong answer.

Please leave a comment to tell us how YOU pronounce FOPE. There’s bonus points for using the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) or Pronunciation Respelling Key!

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Thanks for joining us today!

Zion Brewer

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Today Curious Greg is going to Houston to visit the Johnson Space Center. Before he leaves he wanted to share the final configuration pieces to the hybrid lab. When we last left the lab we configured our virtual directories. Today we will start with address policy. From the on-premises hybrid server open the Exchange Management Console and navigate to Organization Configuration > Hub Transport. Edit the default email address policy. On the E-mail addresses page select Add to enter the email address for your service-routing namespace. In my case service.edustl.com.

On the SMTP Email Address dialog select the Email address local part check box and select use alias. Also select the accepted domain for the email address and browse to service.edustl.com.

Apply the email address policy immediately.

Enable Outlook Anywhere.

This should be done already and I won’t cover in this blog. To enable check out this.

Configure autodiscover DNS records.

I used an A record for autodiscover.edustl.com and CNAME for autodiscover.service.edustl.com. Since my domain is a split-brain DNS I also configured my internal records.

Configure Federation Gateway

Ensure you have a delegated domain namespace. In my case I named mine exchangefederation.edustl.com.

New-Federationtrust or use EMC. Ensure you use domainproof to get proof for TXT records for both domain and service domain. In my case both edustl.com and service.edustl.com

Once created then you must configure the federation trust. If you don’t get the Application Identifier than your domain proof is probably misconfigured.

Organization Configuration

Next tab over to organization configuration and create new organization relationship. I used the shell but this can be configured in the EMC. Again all this is configured on the hybrid server.

Below I show screenshots of the properties of the org relationship. First one is the free/busy information access I give the cloud tenant.

Second is the external organization properties.

Lots of conflicting information here. I only needed edustl.com and service.edustl.com. Originally I thought I would need the service tenant (*onmicrosoft.com). This is not needed and caused issues with free/busy. I’ve also seen the app URI as both http://outlook.com and outlook.com. It worked for me with just outlook.com. Ensure you have WSSecurity at the end of the autdiscover endpoint. Also – if you recreated the virtual directory ensure to add WSSecurity. Also don’t forget the TargetSharingEpr which corresponds to the POD that you see when you remote powershell into your cloud tenant.

The organization relationship must also be configured on the cloud side. I launched powershell and configured the same information.

Set-OrganizationRelationship -Identity "To Cloud" -DomainNames "service.edustl.com","edustl.com" -MailTipsAccessEnabled $True -MailTipsAccessLevel All -DeliveryReportEnabled $True

Set-OrganizationRelationship -Identity "To On-premises" -DomainNames "exchangefederation.edustl.com","edustl.com" -MailTipsAccessEnabled $True -MailTipsAccessLevel All -DeliveryReportEnabled $True

Mailflow

Send and Receive Connectors with on-premises hybrid Server.

Set-SendConnector or EMC. Specify the FQDN for the connector such as mail.edustl.com. Set the Address space for the service domain. *.service.edustl.com. Use DNS and the source server is the hybrid server.

Configure the Receive Connector.

Ensure that the IP addresses you select are from the FOPE configuration. Also ensure you state the subnet mask.

Remote Domain

Next you setup the remote domains on the on-premises server. Inbound and outbound remote domains. My inbound is edustl.com and outbound is service.edustl.com.

Using the Deployment assistant setup the remote domains:

New-ReceiveConnector -Name "From Cloud" -Usage Internet -RemoteIPRanges <FOPE Outbound IP Addresses> -Bindings 0.0.0.0:25 -FQDN mail2.contoso.com -TlsDomainCapabilities mail.messaging.microsoft.com:AcceptOorgProtocol (remember to get IP addresses from FOPE procedure outlined in deployment assistant).

When last command was setup ran into problem with duplicate domain on FOPE. It appears in domains as duplicatedomain-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx(GUID).edustl.com.

If you use ECP and go to Mail control > Domains and Protection. Change from shared to hosted and back to shared. The error clears.

The last thing to configure is the FOPE configuration. You’ll need both inbound and outbound connectors.

From there you are all set! The last thing to do is to configure MX records based on how you want incoming mail. Use both the deployment assistant and your external DNS provider to configure this.

My service.edustl.com was setup to match service-edustl-com.mail.eo.outlook.com in the hosted namespace. My MX record for on-premises was setup for mail.edustl.com.

I’d tell you more but it appears I got in the capsule during a launch and will not be on earth in a few more seconds. Say goodbye to Curious Greg. Take care.

If you are new to PowerShell or the Office 365 specific tenant cmdlets in PowerShell, here is a nice tool called the PowerShell Command Builder. It allows you to visually build your Office 365 tenant PowerShell scripts.  It doesn’t have Exchange Online PowerShell but is a great start to learning tenant scripts.

Pick “Office 365” from the Products list to show you all the Office 365 tenant “verbs” and “nouns”

To build a script, just drag your “Verb” and drag a “Noun” over to the design surface and it will autogenerate a PowerShell script for you which you can quickly copy.

It even allows you to put in your actual domains to leverage in your script.

Visit the PowerShell Command Builder tool here.

To learn more on how to actually use these scripts with Office 365 via remote PowerShell visit my other post here.

Hi everyone!

As an evolution of our popular http://msftedublogger.wordpress.com/ blog, where we spent a lot of time looking at the tools and technologies behind Live@edu, we have now decided to move the blog onto our TechNet site... a kind of "get with the Microsoft program", as it were :)  Long term Live@edu blog subscribers will know that this blog started off life on Live Spaces before moving onto WordPress, and there it has lived for a while.

So what can you expect with this move? Well, more of the same kind of content on Live@edu and very soon, new content topics on the components that make up (and support) Office 365 for education!  What is also great is that the blogging team has expanded.  Over time, you can expect to hear from:

• Mark Garcia, Education Cloud Architect for Microsoft
• Greg Katz, Education Cloud Architect
• Derek Seymour, Cloud Solution Specialist
• Michael Icore, Cloud Solution Specialist
• Erik Desbois, Cloud Solution Specialist
• Mark Dunkel, SharePoint Technical Specialist
• Kris Kattula, SharePoint Solution Specialist
• ...and yours truly, Jonny Chambers, Specialist Manager for US Education

As ever, we value your input and questions, so get cracking on those... especially any topics you would like to hear about.

All the best!

Jonny

Welcome to our new blog!  My name is Mark Garcia and I have been blogging on the Three UC Amigos blog for the past 3 years with some great customer reach. I have recently moved to the Office 365 for Education team as a Cloud Architect. I look forward to sharing some great technical information with you around Office 365 for Education.

My first post I figured should be around what do you need to do to prepare for Office 365 so I put together a list of steps:

Step 1: Understand what the Office 365 services provide using the Service Descriptions

There are some excellent detailed Office 365 service descriptions written and updated by the product team. Note: the Office 365 for Enterprises service description thus far can be leveraged for Office 365 for Education as there are no major deltas between the tenants with the exception of SharePoint Online.

If you want the technical nitty gritty details about the offering I would not continue on to step 2 without downloading and reading ALL of the service descriptions. I have found these answer a vast majority of your Office 365 functionality questions. Trust me - it will save you time hunting for functionality answers down the road if you pre-read all of these service descriptions as a first step.

Grab the Office 365 service descriptions here.

Step 2: Watch the Office 365 training videos

If you are going to administer Office 365 here are some excellent Office 365 administrator training videos I would add these as a must watch:

Office 365 Jump Start (01): Microsoft Office 365 Overview for IT Pros
Office 365 Jump Start (02): Deploying Clients for Office 365
Office 365 Jump Start (03): Microsoft Office 365 Administration & Automation Using Windows PowerShell™
Office 365 Jump Start (04): Microsoft Office 365 Identity and Access Solutions
Office 365 Jump Start (05): Microsoft Office 365 Directory Synchronization
Office 365 Jump Start (06): Exchange Online Overview for IT Pros
Office 365 Jump Start (07): Microsoft Exchange Online Administration
Office 365 Jump Start (08): Microsoft Staged Exchange Online Migration
Office 365 Jump Start (09): Hybrid Options with Exchange Server & Exchange Online
Office 365 Jump Start (10): Exchange Online Archiving & Compliance
Office 365 Jump Start (11): Lync Online Overview & Configuration for IT Pros
Office 365 Jump Start (12): SharePoint Online Overview
Office 365 Jump Start (13): SharePoint Online Administration
Office 365 Jump Start (14): SharePoint Online Extensibility & Customization
Office 365 Jump Start (15): Office 365 Deployment Overview

Step 3: Read the Office 365 deployment guide

To get a full understanding of all the Office 365 deployment steps there is excellent reference:

Visit the Deployment guide online here or download it here.

Step 4: Read the Introduction to Office 365 for Administrators Guide

This is a great site to learn about roles and administration of Office 365.

Visit it here.

Step 5: Run the Office 365 Readiness tool and remediate any issues

You need to determine if your on prem infrastructure is ready for Office 365. This Office 365 readiness tool can scan and analyze your infrastructure to determine potential issues BEFORE you being your deployment. It will check the following areas of your infrastructure:

• Domains
  • Email domain discovery and number of users leveraging each domain
• User Identity and Account Provisioning
  • Statistical information
  • Active Directory schema and forest/domain functional data
  • Trusts extract (checks for multi-forest constraints)
  • Directory Synchronization
    • Pre-requisite checks
    • Attribute assessment
  • Single sign on
    • Attribute assessment
• Exchange Online
  • Statistical information
  • Public folder, public delegates, and proxyaddresses extract
  • 3^rd party and unified messaging proxyaddresses information
• Lync Online
  • Statistical information
  • SIP domains summary
• SharePoint Online
  • User object count assessment
• Client and End User Experience
  • Summary of domain joined machines for rich experience/SSO readiness
• Network
  • Port analysis on certain Office 365 endpoints
  • DNS records assessment

Grab the O365 Readiness tool here.

The output of this tool will more than likely point out objects or things that need to be remedied prior to your Office 365 deployment. I would not continue to Step 5 until this tool reports no major issues. In particular, pay attention to your Dirsync report as you will want to clean up any objects it says may be an issue when you configure Dirsync to sync your on prem AD objects to the cloud.

Step 5a (if running Windows Server 2008 R2 Active Directory): Run AD Best Practice Analyzer (BPA) tool and remediate any Active Directory issues

AD DS tool is installed by default when you are running Windows Server 2008 R2. This will help clean up any Active Directory issues prior to connecting to Office 365.

Step 6: Walk through the Exchange Deployment Assistant – if you have Exchange On premises or are going greenfield to the cloud run this tool

I recommend reviewing this site in detail to become familiar with the process and steps required:

This site offers Hybrid step by step for Exchange 2003/2007/2010 and Cloud Only step by step. Excellent references and information to help you:

You can also save the steps to PDF for offline reference. Excellent way to search the steps for reference. Go the Exchange DA site here.

Step 7: Determine if your workstations are ready for Office 365:

You can run this agentless MAP tool which will help you determine if your workstations are ready for Office 365 by providing you with reports based Office 365 minimum requirements. It will help you prior to your rollout get machines to the appropriate browser, memory, cpu, levels.

Grab the MAP toolkit here.

Another option here is to leverage System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM), if you have this deployed, to scan your workstations and compare it against the minimum Office 365 workstation requirements here.

Other helpful sites to help you prepare for deployment:

Office 365 Community Wiki – get Office 365 FAQs and help information

Office 365 Transition center – grab great information for end users, etc.

Office 365 E-book – nice free e-book to read about the offering

Office 365 Trust Center – review security and compliance information about Office 365

Office 365 Setup accelerator – nice custom setup guide

This is our first post to learning and getting prepared for Office 365.  Our team will post many more technical articles we learn that help customers or maybe a technical hurdle we overcame with a customer that may help you.

Great news from Georgia!  GSU has rolled out Office 365 as a replacement for their legacy GroupWise environment and users are now enjoying anytime, anywhere, any device access to their email and other collaborative services.

I urge you to check out the case study, here are a few choice quotes:

"There were several problems with Google Mail....In addition to functionality limitations, Google Mail had legal issues that could not enable us to restrict and store data within the United States, as policy requires us to. We also wanted support for retention and e-discovery policies that enterprise-class solutions often offer but that Google wasn’t even willing to talk to us about.”

"The project went very smoothly. I mean, we completed the final push in just one weekend,” says Keith Campbell, Director of Technology Engineering at Georgia State University. “I think this went about as effortlessly as any large email migration can go.”

"When we look at our total cost of ownership of GroupWise versus Office 365, we estimate we will easily save about [US]$1 million in the first five years."

"Office 365 has given us professional-quality tools at a great value, robust reliability and security, and an extensible platform that we add communication and collaboration services to as the university’s needs grow. Given all these advantages, I think the Office 365 migration is one of the best projects this organization has ever undertaken."

We thank GSU for their business and partnership and we are both looking forward to seeing the impact we can have with their teaching and learning.

Enjoy!

Jonny

Just announced on The Exchange Team Blog, “We're happy to announce that the Exchange Server Deployment Assistant (ExDeploy) has been enhanced to include support for configuring hybrid deployments using Exchange 2010 SP2 and the Hybrid Configuration Wizard.”

The first in several upcoming scenario additions for configuring hybrid deployments when using the Hybrid Configuration Wizard, this new scenario is for Exchange 2003 organizations interested in maintaining some users on-premises and some users hosted in the cloud…

- The Exchange Team Blog Exchange Server Deployment Assistant Update for Exchange 2010 SP2 and Office 365 Hybrid Deployments

We expect new checklist guidance for hybrid deployments with Exchange 2007 and Exchange 2010 SP2 to be available in the future. If you need access to the previous step-by-step checklists for Exchange 2003/2007 and Exchange 2010 SP1, then you can find it at TechNet Library > Office 365 Hybrid Deployments with Exchange 2010 SP1.

View The Exchange Team Blog announcement
Exchange Server Deployment Assistant Update for Exchange 2010 SP2 and Office 365 Hybrid Deployments

Try out ExDeploy
Exchange Server Deployment Assistant

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Thanks for joining us today!

Zion Brewer

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We continue to look at better ways to do license assignment in EDU. The initial scripts provide quick way to do assignment but lacked in granularity. When a customer wants to apply licenses we wanted to look at the source AD to track against a single attribute for the license assignment.

Please follow the instructions in this blog. In it you will prepare AD including changing the script if the attribute (Employee attribute) is not sufficient for your needs). The process looks like the below.

To assign the licenses you will need to provide related data sources that consists of the following components:

1. An object identifier
2. An operational attribute that describes the SKU you want to assign and the service plans you want to disable

Please remember to use the appropriate SKU for assignment of licenses

Hi folks,

Around a year ago,the Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) rolled out Live@edu to their 174 school districts to much acclaim. We have just completed the formal case study on this fantastic state-wide implementation. I know you will all want to read more, here is an excerpt to whet your appetite :)

The Kentucky Department of Education (KDE) provides services to the 174 school districts across the state and sought to improve communication and collaboration for teachers and students. KDE upgraded from Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 to a cloud-based Microsoft Outlook Live solution, available through Microsoft Live@edu and powered by Microsoft Exchange Server 2010. KDE conducted the upgrade to 700,000 mailboxes overnight, giving individual districts choices in how to structure their messaging. The upgrade relieves KDE staff, students, and teachers from mailbox size limitations and gives them the flexibility to extend the learning environment. KDE has reduced its management burden and increased system reliability because the messaging environment is maintained in the cloud by Microsoft, and it has avoided U.S.$6.3 million in costs over a four-year period.

The scale of this is still stunning one year later, and a demonstration of what customers are able to do today with Microsoft technology, and a great customer like KDE!

Jonny

This question was from a university in Chicago adopting Office 365 for faculty, staff, and students.

Prerequisites

The first data point you need to gather before you can determine client bandwidth required for Exchange Online is what is your mailbox usage profile?  Are your users light, medium, heavy, or very heavy email users?  How can you determine this?

If you have Exchange 2003/2007/2010 on prem you can use a tool called the Exchange Profile Analyzer to run against your infrastructure to gather this crucial data point. See my other blog post here for more info.

If you migrating from another email system, you will have to gather some mail usage data points either manually or using other message profile statistics. Once you gather the data points you can associate it with the daily mail profile in the matrix below.

Here is a usage matrix we use to determine the mailbox usage profile:

What are the default bandwidth profiles?

After you gather your mailbox usage profile data based on above, you need to associate it to a light, medium, heavy bandwidth profile.  This data was gathered by our internal teams and is still being finalized but it will provide you a rough estimation of bandwidth required for your institution.

Exchange Online Light email user profile bandwidth

Exchange Online Medium email user profile bandwidth

Exchange Online Heavy email user profile bandwidth

Exchange Online Very Heavy email user profile bandwidth

New released Exchange Bandwidth calculator 

We just shipped a very useful Exchange bandwidth calculator you can use with on prem Exchange 2010 or Exchange Online.

Download the newly released beta Exchange client network bandwidth calculator here.

Download the newly released Exchange client network bandwidth guide here.

Plug in the numbers based on the site user mail profile determined above. NOTE: make sure you only use Outlook Anywhere cached (OA-cached column) and OWA 2010 column for Exchange Online. The other columns apply to Exchange on prem only.

Bandwidth estimation examples:

If I have a school that has 3000 Outlook 2010 light users and 1000 Outlook Web App light users connecting to Exchange Online. What estimated bandwidth do I need?

6.4 Mb/s Exchange to client traffic and .99 Mb/s client to Exchange.

If I have a school with 50,000 faculty,staff and students with 8000 Outlook 2010 light faculty and 42000 Outlook Web App Light users for students connecting to Exchange Online. What estimated bandwidth do I need?

63 Mb/s Exchange to client traffic and 16.97 Mb/s client to Exchange

What is the recommended maximum network latency?

It recommended your network have no more than 320ms round trip latency.

Step by step ADFS training video

The folks at TechNet have just released a new Office 365 Jumpstart video training series which can greatly assist you with your Office 365 for Education deployment in areas including ADFS, Dirsync, UM, Exchange Hybrid, archiving, and SharePoint Online. The sessions have excellent information and contain over 11 hours of video training and hands on server installation walkthroughs on all areas of an Office 365 deployment including ADFS, Dirsync, Lync Online, Exchange Hybrid server, and SharePoint Online.  This is a must watch if you want to get an end to end understanding of all the deployment components required to deploy Office 365 for Education.

Preparing your infrastructure for  Office 365 – watch it here

Deploying Federated ID – ADFS Part I – watch it here

Deploying Federated ID – ADFS Part II – watch it here

Deploying Dirsync Appliance – watch it here

Planning for Lync Online – watch it here

Planning for Exchange Online Unified Messaging – watch it here

Deploying Exchange online mail and routing – watch it here

Deploying Exchange Hybrid Server Part I – watch it here

Deploying Exchange Hybrid Server Part II – watch it here

Planning for Exchange Online Archiving – watch it here

Planning for SharePoint Online – watch it here

Using and deploying SharePoint Online – watch it here

After watching the training videos, now you are ready to put this learning into a lab.  If you don’t have Hyper-V lab for example, we have some incredible virtual labs for Office 365 where you can conduct hands on learning with our labs in the cloud (no local VMs required) – it also has step by step guidance in the virtual lab so it shows you exactly what to do. Very useful if you get stuck in your deployment:

Use our awesome Office 365 hands on virtual labs on ADFS, Dirsync, Exchange Hybrid (note: this lab hasn’t been updated with the Sp2 Hybrid Configuration Wizard – it is better to use this instead) and SharePoint Online are here.

More training links on ADFS and Dirsync here.

When we first launched Office 365 for education back in June 2012, UMass Amherst and NUI Galway recorded a showcase video with us, highlighting their use of our Office 365 platform .  If you have not seen that, check it out!

Following on from this, NUI Galway students just recorded a video about their experiences as part of a final year project.  In it, they discussed what they were able to achieve and their takeaways.  I will let the video speak for itself:

The collaboratively run course now spans 3 institutions: UMass Amherst, taught by Prof. Gino Sorcinelli, NUI Galway, taught by Murray Scott and Amr BadrElDin at the American University in Cairo.

As I watched the video, I picked up a few themes and benefits:

• Learning from anywhere and with anyone
• Building virtual relationships and teams in geographically and culturally diverse and dispersed teams
• Workforce-ready for a global workforce by linking the classroom to the real world

I cannot wait to see where this course and its students go next.

Jonny

Great news we just announced today the new Exchange Online mailbox quotas are now 50GB in size with no price increase. You get double mailbox storage for FREE and it will also be applied to any existing mailboxes you have in production with no extra steps required!

It is starting to rollout to tenants today and will continue through November. So you now get massive mailboxes in Office 365 education which should provide plenty of mail storage for faculty, staff and students for quite a long time.

Here is a matrix with all the new storage quota details:

Please read the official blog post here for more details.

The new Office 365 is just around the corner, interested parties can access a preview today, interested SIs and ISVs can start building apps and solutions by following Office developer guidance and also integrate with Azure AD.

Over the next few weeks, I will be highlighting some great Microsoft partners that have built innovative solutions for the Office 365 platform and I wanted to start with Max’s Toolbox for Office 365 and a guest blog post from Wendy Kennedy, co-founder and Chief Executive of eWord, the company behind the solution.

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SharePoint is a fantastic platform for collaboration in the Enterprise, providing all the necessary tools for getting things done. From the minute we saw it, we knew we had to do for SharePoint, what for years we have been doing for Office, that is, make it a great platform for kids to learn.

Max’s Toolbox for Microsoft Office has been described as “Training wheels for Microsoft Office”, a way to introduce kids to Office, giving them a smooth ramp to mastering tools that are essential later in life. It’s the same mission we have with Max’s Toolbox for Office365, taking the business tool that is SharePoint, and adapting it for kids. It’s still SharePoint; it’s just tuned for learning.

To see it in action, check out the video:

So how did we did we do it? Take a look for yourself.

The first thing you will notice is that it doesn’t really look like SharePoint, but don’t let that deceive you, it’s 100% SharePoint. Our goal with the home page was to simplify the experience down to just the features of SharePoint which young learners can benefit from.

The other goal was to make it work great on Tablets; this is why you will see large buttons, and navigation around the edges, near thumbs. The Microsoft surface represents a revolution in computer based learning, we wanted to make sure we embraced it.

Let’s break that down further.

Here you can see the day of the week, and then below it, the lessons scheduled for that day. We also have a place for short messages, a simple way for teachers, or the school, to communicate to all students.

Below this you can see pictures of the students’ class mates, hovering over them will give you their names, which is a great way to learn them at the start of the year.

Next to the students is a picture of their teacher, and a list of the most recent pieces of feedback received. Teachers are able to review work students do within the Max’s Toolbox environment, and each student will see only the feedback addressed to them.

Using the experience we gained by working with schools around the world, we identified four key actions students are likely to perform as part of their class work. These are accessible via four, large, touch friendly buttons.

Let’s take a quick tour through each of the modules starting with “Words”.

“Words” is a lightweight, web based word processor that allows students to create documents right within the browser. Common actions are broken out onto the right hand side, in touch friendly buttons, and since it’s in the cloud, saving a document happens automatically.

By storing the documents in a SharePoint library, you can easily open them with the desktop version of Microsoft Word later.

“Lists” are the next module, this wraps an easy to use interface around the standard SharePoint lists functionality. After clicking on “Lists” the student is presented with a number of predefined templates. These are created by the teacher, and behind the scenes are standard SharePoint list templates.

Here you can see the simplified view onto the list; common actions again are available on the right hand side.

With each of the items stored in a SharePoint List, they can easily be exported to the desktop version of Microsoft Excel.

Kids love to draw, and so a simple online version of Paint is the next module.

“Pictures” support shapes and colors and kids will be up and artistic in no time. Just like “Words” there is no save button, all drawings are automatically saved as a JPG in a SharePoint Picture Library.

The final module is “Activities” and it provides a platform for web based games, for example the one below that helps kids learn the various parts of their bodies.

Activities can be added to the solution by the teachers and are written in JavaScript.

For the technical people reading this blog, Max’s Toolbox for Office365 was written using the SharePoint JavaScript client. There is nothing server side, no code to deploy, it’s lightweight and easy to upgrade.

Thanks!

Wendy

eWord Development Pty Ltd, an Adelaide, Australia based company has been a Microsoft Partner for more than 10 years. Its flagship product Max’s Toolbox, has been described as “Training Wheels for Microsoft Office” and has enhanced the learning of thousands of very young students by providing a practical technology experience. The program featured an early childhood interface to Microsoft® Office, comprising MaxWrite© for Microsoft® Word, MaxShow© for Microsoft® PowerPoint®, and MaxCount© for Microsoft® Excel.

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On April 16, Microsoft announced the availability of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services.  This new service now makes it possible for customers to move applications into the cloud. Microsoft is now the only cloud provider with fully supported infrastructure and platform service offerings. Microsoft provides a comprehensive hybrid cloud solution that integrates customers' existing IT infrastructure with the latest cloud technology.

As a faculty member, you and your students can use Windows Azure for free, no credit card needed. To read about and apply for a Windows Azure Educator Grant please go to Windows Azure Educators. After receiving your application and verification of your faculty status, we will send you a grant letter to sign and send back to us to get passcodes for your Azure accounts. Neither you nor your students will pay or provide a credit card for access to Windows Azure. Accounts are valid for 12 months for faculty and 6 months for students and can be extended if needed.

To help you get started with Windows Azure in the classroom, we have developed resources and course and lab material you can access at Windows Azure Resource Kit or on Faculty Connection Web Site. Additionally there is a wealth of information on Windows Azure Documentation for you to use.

Finally, if you want to get more involved, work with us and collaborate with other Azure faculties around the world on Windows Azure content, teaching material and research projects, apply to become a Windows Azure University Faculty. Send an email to AzureU@microsoft.com with subject line “RSVP AzureU Faculties” with your name, email, university, phone number and address in the body. Please indicate if you have or will be teaching Azure in close future.

Enjoy!

Jonny

Once upon a time, e-mail was the fastest and easiest way to
reach your student body, particularly when the message contained an attachment
such as a photo, document or slide deck.  However, today it's one of the last places
students check for something new or interesting. There are simply too many
other communication options available that are more social and engaging.

So it should come as no surprise that students these days prefer interacting on
mobile devices and social media sites over traditional forms of communication
such as email, which may sit unread in an inbox for days or even weeks. What is
surprising however is that some institutions still rely heavily on email
listservs to promote campus events and other activities that are key to overall
student success.

A new approach! ConnectYard extends the reach of Microsoft
SharePoint and Office 365 to today's most popular social media and mobile
devices. With more and more employees working remotely, ConnectYard enables
organizations to bring the right people and information together instantly, by
increasing the speed of communication, which ultimately raises productivity and
reduces technology deployment, training and support costs.

SharePoint Online:

 
  
With the ever-expanding number of communication options
available to students, faculty and administrators, institutions are recognizing
both the opportunity and necessity of extending communications beyond
traditional email in order to facilitate greater student engagement and
increased participation.

The ConnectYard App for SharePoint Online (SharePoint 2013
running on Office 365) allows your institution to easily deliver important and
timely notifications to students via SMS (text, picture and video messaging),

Facebook:

Twitter:

LinkedIn :

and other places they are more likely to check and interact
with than email. This serves to speed message receipt and response times as
well as creates a more cohesive, connected learning environment. 

To see the ConnectYard App for SharePoint Online in action,
checkout their video demo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62vnio1kJ5I

For a free trial of ConnectYard for SharePoint Online, visit
the Microsoft Office 365 store at http://tinyurl.com/cy365app

Office Mobile for iPhone

Today June 14 2013 Microsoft is releasing Office Mobile for iPhone in the US market and available in the Apple App Store at no additional charge for Office 365 subscribers. Starting June 18, Office Mobile for iPhone will become available in 135 international markets in 29 languages. Office Mobile for iPhone is free of charge for Office 365 subscribers, and provides a great mobile viewing and editing experience across Word, PowerPoint and Excel.  To utilize Office Mobile for iPhone it requires the user to have Office 365 Pro subscription with the A3 SKU plan (or E3 for commercial customers) as well as an Office365 SIGN IN account. Screenshots noted at Office blog HERE

Similar to Office Mobile on Windows Phone, Office Mobile for iPhone offers great Office content viewing and on-the-go content editing capabilities for Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Compatible  with iPhone 4, 4S and 5, iPod Touch 5th Generation running iOS 6.1 or later.

Some of the key benefits:

• ·         Consistent Office Experience. Your formatting and documents remain intact when viewing, editing, or adding comments, thanks to support for charts, animations, SmartArt graphics, and shapes.  And when you return to your PC or Mac, your document looks like it should.
• ·         Easy Access. We made it easy access your Office content in the cloud on SkyDrive or SkyDrive Pro.  Also, because Office Mobile is connected to your Office 365 subscription, you’ll see the content you recently viewed on your computer in the Recent Documents panel on your phone. And, of course, you can view and edit Office documents sent in email.
• ·         Optimized for What You Want to Do on a Small Screen. An example, the Slide Navigator allows you to page through PowerPoint presentations fast, while Speaker Notes help you practice presentations on the go. And, when moving Word documents from your PC to your phone, the Resume Reading feature takes you to the exact point in the document where you last left off, so you never miss a beat. 
• ·         Sharing Built-in. You can make quick edits and share your documents, right from your phone with Office Mobile. When working with others, you can review comments in Word and Excel documents on your phone and add your own. When you’re done, you can share your files with others on SkyDrive or SkyDrive Pro or just send your document as an email attachment.
• ·         View & Edit: Office Mobile for iPhone allows you to access, view, and edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents on the go from your smartphone. You can also create new Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.
• ·         Formatting: Document elements and formatting remain intact when viewing, editing, or adding comments, thanks to support for charts, animations, SmartArt graphics, and shapes.

How do I get Office Mobile for iPhone?

Office 365 subscribers can download the application in 2 ways:

1.       Go directly to the Apple App Store and search for Microsoft Office Mobile, and then download it. 

2.       Or go to your Office account page, select their type of phone, operator, and mobile number and we’ll send a text message to their phone with a link to Office Mobile in the app store.

What about the iPad or Android?

• ·         We built Office Mobile for iPhone to ensure a great Office experience when using a small screen device, similar to Office Mobile on Window Phone.  If you have an iPad, we recommend using the Office Web Apps which provide the best Office experience on a tablet.  We have made lots of enhancements to Office Web Apps including a touch experience for tablet users.
• ·         Office also provides additional iOS and Android capabilities for the things people want to do most on their mobile devices – email, real-time communications and note-taking. We provide native apps for OneNote, Lync and SharePoint, in addition to supporting Exchange Active Sync for email, calendar and contacts.

Enjoy!!

I have several customers in education getting upgraded to the Office 365 Service Upgrade for 2013. Most have migrated smoothly but a few customers have seen some issues after upgrade so I decided to post some guidance/FAQ to help make it a better upgrade experience.

What does the Office 365 Service Upgrade for 2013 upgrade mean?

If you have been on Office 365 Education prior to February 27th 2013 this means you are you are on previous technology of cloud services (2010 technologies). We shipped a new Office 365 Education offering in February based on the 2013 technologies. We have been upgrading 2010 (wave14) customers to 2013 (wave15).

Where can I read more information on what new capabilities are in the Office 365 Service Upgrade for 2013?

Exchange Online here

Lync Online here

SharePoint Online here

Office 365 Pro Plus here

I also recommend you read and understand the new Office 365 service descriptions here as this is like the detailed functional specification of each service.

Is there end user or power user training available on these new capabilities?

Yes, it is available here.

Is there administrator training or guides on this new 2013 tenant?

Yes, great information available here and on my other blog post here.

Do I need to change anything on my side prior to this upgrade?

Potentially yes if you are not current on the latest service packs and cumulative patches for Office, XP or Exchange. This 2013 Service Upgrade has newer patch requirements that were not required in the 2010 version.

I have had customers experience Outlook client connectivity issues if they are not patched on the client or on the hybrid server for example. Please read here on the latest requirements for this upgrade. I strongly urge you to follow these requirements closely and not skip this step to keep your upgrade clean.

The other high priority item to remediate/evaluate prior to the 2013 upgrade is you also need to check your DNS, Outlook, and Autodiscover settings prior to the upgrade. Several other Outlook client connectivity issues may occur if you any of these are misconfigured prior to upgrade. See here.

Is there a 2013 upgrade step by step guide I can follow?

Yes, there a very useful Office 365 Service Upgrade 2013 guide here which I strongly recommend you follow closely to avoid issues.

How long does it take for me to get upgraded?

On average each tenant upgrades takes about 48 hours to complete. No loss of email connectivity or productivity will occur during this time. The end user will be asked to restart Outlook and assuming you followed the patching and configuration steps above there should be no further client touch required. SharePoint and Lync will not be interrupted either.

What do I have to do post upgrade?

You have still migrate all of your SharePoint 2010 site collections to SharePoint 2013 including your ‘My Site’ site collection to enable SkyDrive Pro for your end users. See here for site collection upgrade steps.

Do I need to install new clients?

No, there are no client upgrades are required. You can continue to use Outlook 2007, Office 2010, and Lync 2010 against the new 2013 upgrade provided you have patched them appropriately in the link provided above.

For more information on the upgrade please visit the Office 365 Service Upgrade Center for Enterprise here.

When Office 365 Education was launched, and the ability to provide seamless single sign-on to the service was realised, a lot of my customers were emailing asking me how they could have all the benefits of ADFS without the infrastructure burden. After all, many education customers, particularly schools, do not have the funds to invest in on-premises hardware and have to be as efficient as they can with what they already have.

The truth is that in order to provide a highly available, properly sized, secure ADFS infrastructure some customers would have to deploy extra servers, and surely part of anybody’s cloud strategy is to reduce on-premises hardware not add to it! That’s where the Office 365 Adapter can help – by utilising the power of Windows Azure.

With the introduction of Windows Azure Virtual Machines, institutions who require Active Directory federation have another Microsoft-supported choice for hosting these services.

Aside from the obvious benefit of moving to Windows Azure being reduced on-premises hardware, there are many other ways it can be an advantage:

• Continuity - your students and staff can continue to sign in to Office 365 Education from outside school, even if your school broadband link goes down.
• Flexibility – components can be relocated, load-balanced and distribute across the world.
• Resilience and disaster recovery – Windows Azure can host redundant critical services, enabling failover in case of an on-premises disaster.

Download the Office 365 Adapter guide today to see how it all works!

Of course, even the Office 365 Adapter requires some time and effort to set up and configure. With the IT manager’s time already divided too many different ways, it might be nice to pay somebody else to sort SSO out for you. Helpfully, there are partners like IAM Cloud who offer similar cloud-hosted solutions to provide ADFS without the on-premises infrastructure to go with it!

Don't forget to check out the new password synchronisation options there are, too! When ADFS is just out of reach, DirSync & Password Sync can keep your student and staff identities the same between Active Directory and Office 365, without the single sign-on capabilities.

On July 10th at our UK HQ in Thames Valley Park, Reading, Berks, we’ll be holding an event in conjunction with the University of West London to bring all interested parties together to showcase and discuss Office 365 Education, and how by harnessing its power institutions can provide a better social learning environment.

In the summer of 2012 The University of West London set out to harness the immense potential of the free cloud-based suite of collaboration tools, provided by Office 365 Education, to create a personalised, interactive, social platform to support the institution’s mission to raise aspiration through the pursuit of excellence. Allowing students to combine social learning with academic study.  The University won the UCISA Award for Excellence, 2012 for the service they have created.

This event will provide detail on what UWL wanted to achieve, how they accomplished it and a demonstration of capability and features. In addition Microsoft will share latest features of Office 365 Education.

9:30am –             Arrive and refreshments

9:50am –             Welcome to Microsoft

10:00am –           Introduction by VC of UWL

10:15am –           Office 365 latest information– Microsoft

10:45am –           UWL – Highway to Heaven– Adrian Ellison CIO UWL

11:30am –           Break

11:45am -            UWL – Presentation/Demonstration of environment

12:45pm –           Lunch and networking

1:45pm –             Fulcrum – Developing the portal (partner who worked with UWL)

2:30pm-               Open Questions on UWL environment and Office 365

2:45pm-               Break

3:00pm-               Janet Amendments for Office 365 and Janet/Microsoft Alliance Agreement

3:20pm –             Office 365 user group – introduction – Group discussion                          

3:45pm-               Close

Places for this event are very limited to register today using invite code 7EA736 to avoid disappointment!

Sneaking in at the tail end of last week Senior Product Manager for SharePoint, Mark Kashman (@mkashman) announced over on the Office 365 technology blog that SkyDrive Pro apps are now available for Windows 8 and Apple iOS for SharePoint Online users in Office 365.

Both apps are available in their respective Windows Store and Apple App Stores NOW!

Learn more about SkyDrive Pro app for Windows 8 and SkyDrive Pro app for iOS on Office.com.

Over the course of the year until the end of September 2013, we are going to be rolling out the new Office 365 Education service to existing customers who are on the “pre-upgrade Office 365”. 

The service upgrade for Office 365 will deliver exciting new features, including:

The new Office

• If you have purchased a subscription to Office, you will get the clean, new look; expanded support for smartphones and tablets, all delivered with the new, fast, Click-to-run deployment technology.

Exchange Online

• Outlook Web App has a new look optimized for easy touch-access on tablets and mobile phones.
• Improved anti-malware protection, that can prevent malware from ever reaching inboxes.

SharePoint Online

• Better collaboration, making it easier to share documents with external users and manage external sharing.
• SkyDrive Pro, a cloud storage option users can keep synchronized with their hard-drive for off-line access.

Lync Online

• New Lync Web App which delivers a full Lync Meeting experience with high-definition video and VoIP, all from a browser.
• One-click meeting access: whether you're at the office or on the road, you don't need to remember dial-in numbers and passcodes.

The Microsoft Online Portal is the primary means of communication about your service upgrade, but the technical contact listed for your Office 365 tenant will also receive emails notifying you about the service upgrade.

I have received this common question for customer’s Office 365 Education tenants who were upgraded to Wave15.  They receive this error:

Prepare for takeoff!

Upgrade is currently disabled for your site collection. Please check back later to see if it has been unlocked for you.

The resolution to this issue is found here.

You can watch the step by step on how to fix this here as well:

Over on the Office blog there have been a couple of announcements. If you’ve got an Office 365 subscription (A3 or A4, or the Office ProPlus subscription and others) then you can now get Office Mobile for Android Phones and the iPhone!

Office Mobile is the official companion to Microsoft Office. Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents look great on your phone, thanks to support for charts, animations, SmartArt Graphics, and shapes. When you make edits or add comments to a document, the formatting and layout remain intact. When you return to your PC or Mac, your document looks like it should.