Microsoft Education in the Cloud

Three big announcements today:

Office for Android tablet

This is a great addition to the Office 365 ProPlus suite where you can get Excel, Word, PowerPoint on your Android tablet now.

Word for Android tablet

Excel for Android tablet

PowerPoint for Android tablet

Grab them here and combine them with your Office 365 ProPlus license benefit to unlock the full features:

Word   Excel  PowerPoint

OneDrive for Business Sync for Mac Preview and OneDrive for Business for iOS update 

This is the ability to have OneDrive for Business syncing on your Mac platform and an updated client for getting to OneDrive for Business on your iOS device.

New OneDrive for Business/consumer client for iOS

Grab the bits here for iOS:

iOS

New OSX OneDrive for Business Sync preview

Grab the bits here for Mac OSX Sync client preview:

Mac Sync

Outlook for iOS phone and tablet and Android phone and tablet

This is another great feature with Office 365 ProPlus which will provide a rich Outlook client for your iOS and Android mobile and tablet platforms! This is from our Acompli acquisition.

iOS Outlook

Outlook for Android tablet

Grab the new Outlook bits here:

iOS  Android

I get asked quite a bit about our Moodle integration with Office 365. The good news is starting today there is now a fantastic Office 365 and Moodle integration story.

Moodle for Office 365 integration

Here are some talking points about the offering:

· The Moodle Office 365 integration provides faculty, educators and students a learning platform for increased productivity and is yet another example of how Microsoft is committed to empowering every student, educator and institution to do more and achieve more through the use of technology.

· Moodle has already changed the face of classroom management in 241 countries. Now, with Office 365 integration, Moodle becomes even more powerful. With new open-source plugins, Office 365 and Moodle work together to bring a better and more productive classroom experience to teachers and students alike.

· Educators are busy running their class and preparing their students for success; students are busy trying to manage it all and build skills for the future.  Announced today, the Moodle with Office 365 integration is helping to reinvent productivity in education with:

o Easy Access.  Your Office 365 username and password now gets you into Moodle with no additional credentials to remember.  Moodle is now also accessible from the new Office 365 app launcher, meaning it’s just a few clicks away from any of your favorite Office 365 apps like Delve, Outlook Web App, SharePoint and others.

o Work Offline.  Moodle courses can now include Office documents (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, etc.) that can be edited on any device and even offline – no need to stop working if you don’t have an Internet connection.

o Mobile Friendly, Cross-Platform. Moodle calendar events can be synced with Office 365 and will show up in all of your mobile devices that support Exchange – iOS, Android, Windows etc.

o Classroom Ready.  Teachers and faculty can embed their interactive Mix lectures in Moodle courses and manage Moodle assignment submissions through OneNote.

Office Mix and Moodle integration

What type of integration is available with Moodle and Office 365?

Where can I download the Office 365 plug ins for Moodle?

GitHub under GPLv3

Moodle Plug-Ins Directory via Azure Certified Virtual Machine Image

Read more on the announcement from our Open Technologies subsidiary here.

This is an awesome addition to Office 365 tenants and Office 365 Education customers and is in the process of rolling out to tenants very shortly  It is the first of our NextGen portal offerings in SharePoint Online which are coming.

What is Office 365 Video?

Office 365 Video is a NextGen portal which will be available in Office 365 tenants in the near future. It has begun its rollout to First Release tenants in December.

Streaming a video

Read more about it here.

Watch this excellent video on how Office 365 Video works here or click image below:

Where does this fit in education?

I was reading that the one of the top technology needs that over 65% of higher ed students wished they had access to recorded lectures via the ECAR 2014 student research data. 

In K12, there are a lot of cycles on focusing on Flipping the Classroom, Proctor based learning, Khan Academy style of learning. I have also read that students retain a significant percentage more when they watch a recorded lecture vs. a live lecture since they can pause, rewind, etc.  Office 365 Video can be a great accelerator or landing portal to help with these K12 initiatives.

Several customers have commented that this is a something they have been spending a lot of time and resources on and still do not have a great solution.  Office 365 Video can help provide this great student need in education. 

What are some needs that are met by Office 365 Video for education customers?

1) Secure - Closed video streaming site to just education institution (no external sharing). Videos are encrypted at rest and in transit.

2) Protected - Permissions and security – only users and students with permissions can view lectures/videos –  so it video content can be controlled by user.  eDiscovery can scan video content with E3

3) Mobile - Rich mobile consumption for multi-device use – mobile, tablet, cross browser

4) Social - Rich Yammer and Office Graph integration – for enterprise social – students can comment and discuss videos with the Yammer sidebar

5) Recording Tools – Complimentary Lecture capture tools in Office Mix and Lync lecture capture

Both Office Mix and Lync client meeting recordings can be stored in Office 365 Video providing two no cost lecture capture solutions to help feed video/audio/desktop sharing/presentation lecture content into Office 365 Video.

Office Mix

Lync meeting capture recording

6) Scale and Reach – Office 365 Video is powered by Azure Media Services which scaled to millions of users for the Olympics live and recorded content. Additionally, videos can be found using SharePoint Search and also proactively presented to users using Delve and Office Graph.

What does the Office 365 Video architecture look like?

The architecture is a combination of SharePoint Online portal for the front end and Azure Media Services for the transcoding and streaming.

What video formats can be uploaded to Office 365 Video for H.264 streaming?

The following formats are supported:  .mp4, .mpeg, .mpg, .avi, .wmv, .dv, .3gp, .3g2, .3gp2, .asf, .mts, .m2ts, .mod, .ts, .vob, .xesc, .m2v, .ismv

Which Office 365 plans are required to get Office 365 Video?

Office 365 Video is included in the Office 365 E1, E3 and E4 subscription plans. Any user that has not been assigned one of the above licenses will not have use rights to Office 365 Video.

Do customers have to incur additional costs for Azure Media Services consumption?

The integrated Azure Media Services usage does not incur additional cost to customer; videos stored in Office 365 will count against SharePoint Online team sites pooled storage.

What Office 365 workloads must I have deployed for Office 365 Video to work?

Office 365 Video requires SharePoint Online. Once Office 365 Video has been rolled out to a qualified customer (as specified in the previous FAQ), Office 365 Video will be enabled for all users that have one of the eligible plans and have a SharePoint Online license assigned.

Great news effective now we announced that we have upped the attachment migration limit size to 150MB attachments. This migration attachment limit was previously 25MB which caused a lot of attachment mitigation prior to migration if your on prem quota was larger than 25MB. This is an excellent bump in migration attachment size to help avoid attachment mitigation!

This new limit will apply to Exchange migrations as well as IMAP migrations, and other email platforms, etc.  If you also note above – the send/receive attachment limit remains at 25-36MB depending on the client. The good news however is if you look on the Office 365 Roadmap under ‘In Development’ here you will see there are future plans to make the send/receive attachment limit the same quota of 150MB which is also great news!

Please see the announcement here

Public service description update here