We're excited to share that that faculty and staff will, as of December 1st, be able to access the same Office 365 ProPlus benefit as their students. This means that any school or tertiary institution licencing Office for all of their faculty and staff can now include an Office 365 ProPlus subscription at no extra cost for all students, faculty and staff.

Extending the Office 365 ProPlus benefit to faculty and staff ensures that teachers are using the latest versions of Office and the same feature set as their students. It will allow teachers to install full Office on up to five PCs or Macs and unlock the editing capabilities of the Office apps for iPad. It also gives them access to all their Office documents both at school and at home. With Office 365 ProPlus teachers can take advantage of great Office apps and add-ins like Office Mix to record and publish class lectures.

How does my school take advantage of this benefit you ask?

This is a benefit of the Ministry of Education’s agreement with Microsoft, where every state and integrated school in New Zealand is eligible to get Office 365 ProPlus software for your students, and soon your teachers and faculty.

Office 365 ProPlus includes all the familiar and full Office applications, such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and offers the ability for these to be locally installed on up to five devices and available offline. This also includes Office for Mac and Office for iPad.

To enable your students (and soon staff) to get Office software for their personal use, the next steps are:

If you already have the Office 365 cloud service:

1. Contact Datacom to add the no-cost student and faculty Office 365 Pro Plus SKU's to your Microsoft agreement (faculty from December 1st)
2. Assign the Office 365 ProPlus software to your students (in the Office 365 Admin Portal) and staff from December 1st
3. Download – your students and staff are then able to download the Office 365 ProPlus software to their personal devices

If you don’t have the Office 365 cloud service:

1. Contact Datacom to add the no-cost Office 365 Plan A2 and the Office 365 Pro Plus licences to your Microsoft agreement
2. Deploy Office 365 for your school (quick deployment at www.fasttrack.office.com, or you may need a partner to assist)
3. Assign the Office 365 ProPlus software to your students and soon staff (in the administration portal in Office 365)
4. Download – your students and staff are then able to download the Office ProPlus software to their personal devices

You can contact Datacom to find out more and take these steps at nzschool@datacom.co.nz.