“Did you get my last email?”

Have you ever sent an email to someone and wondered why you haven’t had a response? Is that distribution group you asked a question to ignoring you? Chances are you’ve encountered people who aren’t making best use of automatic replies and MailTips…

Helpfully, both Live@edu and Office 365 for education, because they both make use of Exchange Online, have the ability to allow users to set little reminder prompts on individual mailboxes and distribution groups to give senders a little pre-warning or useful tip prior to them sending that all important email.

Here are just some situations where an automatic reply or MailTip can really save the day:

• Asking a question to your tutor that needs an urgent response in order to meet a coursework deadline, but the tutor is on holiday for three days.
• Accidentally sending a piece of confidential pupil data to someone outside of your school.
• Attaching a 10MB zip file of photos of your cats to a distribution group containing 1000 recipients.

The great thing about it is that automatic replies don’t just apply to emails; they even translate across to Lync. As you can see below I’ve got Damon in my Lync contacts and at a glance I can see that he’s set his status to “Out of Office” and set an automatic reply, or vacation response, OOF notification, etc. telling me that he’s going to be away until tomorrow. Immediately I know that if I have something urgent I should contact someone else or expect a delayed response.

You can find out more about how to configure MailTips on Outlook Live Help, as well as information on Automatic Replies.

Lastly – have you ever wondered why some people refer to being “out of office” as OOF rather than OOO… Well here’s the answer!

Do you use MailTips and Automatic Replies?

Tell us your best practice tips for avoiding disappointment by using MailTips and Automatic Replies in the comments!

The Schools Network—formerly known as the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust—is in the business of transforming education around the world. Over the past 25 years, this London-based, not-for-profit organization has built a world-class network of innovative, high-performing schools and academies in partnership with business and the wider community. It works with a long list of academies in the United Kingdom and nearly 80 percent of state-funded schools. It also works with international schools in China and Abu Dhabi. The outcome? Better teachers, better student achievement scores, and students better prepared to make a difference in the future.

There was a point, though, where it seemed unclear how The Schools Network was going to continue on the trajectory that its previous successes had laid out. Changes to government policy meant less income was generated from grant-funded projects and The Schools Network needed to be more commercially focused. It needed to find new ways to work effectively, streamline processes, and cut costs—all without cutting into the programs that were leading to better outcomes for so many schools and students.

As they looked for ways to reduce costs and operate more efficiently, leaders at The Schools Network had to confront the challenge posed by the organization's technology infrastructure. Over the course of its 25-year existence, the organization's entire infrastructure had grown and expanded in a manner that was more spontaneous and organic than planned and cultivated.

The email infrastructure in particular was a challenge to maintain. The organization relied on email servers that were several years old. Virtual private network (VPN) technology enabled travelling employees to access email securely, but often only after a call to the service desk for help.

Add to this a propensity for the infrastructure to break, leaving some 500 users around the world with no way to communicate easily, and it becomes clear why leaders at The Schools Network began to realize that a cloud-based messaging solution, managed and maintained by an external partner, might offer a compelling and cost-effective alternative to the solution they had.

The key question was which online messaging solution would be best for The Schools Network.

View Case Study

Your Turn

Are you deploying Office 365 for education this year? What things do you look for in a cloud service? Let us know in the comments!

If you’ve been looking at Microsoft’s cloud services for a while now, in particular Live@edu, then you may well have seen the trusty deployment guide that has helped many customers deploy Live@edu in their institutions successfully. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a deployment guide for Office 365?

Good news! There is, and what’s even better is that you can browse and search it all online; meaning you get the most up to date information when you need it. You can download and print off, but it gets regularly updated so I’d keep the online version bookmarked when you can find it.

You might notice that it’s actually the Office 365 for enterprises guide I’m going to link to below, but that’s ok – it applies to the education version just swap out the word “enterprises” for “education” and you’re good to go…

Office 365 Deployment Guide for Enterprises

Online | Download

Other documents you should get to know on your journey to deploying Office 365 for education are the service descriptions – comprehensive overviews of every aspect of Office 365, from Exchange Online to Office 2010 Professional Plus. Everything you’ve ever wanted to know about what each service can do is in these bibles.

Office 365 for enterprises Service Descriptions

Download

Free Trial!

Once you’ve read all of this (I promise there won’t be a test!) why not sign up for a free trial? Since there is no specific Office 365 for education trial, the Plan E3 30-day trial experience is similar to Office 365 for education.

This is a question I get asked quite often from customers.  There are certainly many variables that factor into your average throughput during a migration including data source, network, migration engine, service throttling, etc. We just released an excellent whitepaper called the Exchange Online Migration Performance Guide that explains this in detail. I included some snippets below:

Here are some of your major considerations that affect your average throughput per hour:

The whitepaper will drill into each topic above in excellent detail so I won’t rehash it here.

I also found this extremely useful migration throughput per hour chart which shows you can, on average, get around .5GB to 10GB per hour of migrated data depending on source and migration method. This average migration throughput was put together based on Microsoft Premier Deployment services data from actual customers migrating to Office 365:

I highly recommend you read and understand the Office 365 Exchange Online Migration Performance Guide whitepaper here before you begin your migration to Office 365.

Work together from virtually anywhere. Help your students, faculty and alumni stay connected and work together from virtually anywhere! Provide free access to email, calendars, document sharing, instant messaging, video chat, mobile email, and more. Help them complete assignments, create presentations and develop projects together on the Web.

Office 365 Overview for
Education

Learn about Microsoft Office 365 for education, the Microsoft platform for delivering email, calendaring, communication, and collaboration services in the cloud.

View here on demand

Office 365 Overview for Current Live@edu Customers

Understand the opportunities and benefits available to your education institution as Microsoft transitions from the Live@edu solution to Office 365 for education service. Hear how you can leverage your existing on-premise investment as you move to cloud-based resources on your terms.  

View here on demand

Office 365 Deployment Overview

This presentation is designed to help you understand the options and plan your deployment. It explains the terminology, compares the deployment options, and describes the tools that are included with Office 365 for education.

Coming soon to on demand here

It’s Easy in the Cloud – Communicate and Work Together sponsored by Campus Tech (Higher Ed)
 - Thursday, April 19, 2012 11:00 AM Pacific Time/2:00 PM Eastern

Give your students, faculty and staff the tools they need to communicate and work together across PCs, phones and browsers from virtually anywhere. Help save time, money and free up valuable resources, while helping improve learning outcomes.

Discover how Georgia State University uses the power of the cloud to help their educators and staff communicate more easily.

Register here

It’s Easy in the Cloud – Communicate and Work Together sponsored by Tech & Learning (K12) Tuesday,
April 24, 2012 1:00 PM Pacific Time/4:00 PM Eastern

Give your students, educators and staff the tools they need to communicate and work together across PC, phones
and browsers from virtually anywhere. Help save time, money and free up valuable resources, while helping improve learning outcomes.

Discover how Henry County Schools uses the power of the cloud to help their educators and staff communicate more
easily across 51 locations.

Register here

Implementing Office 365 across the District/Campus Community Thursday, April 26, 2012 12:00 PM Pacific
Time/3:00 PM Eastern

Excited about the value Office 365 services could bring your School or College? Now it’s time to consider how best to implement and get adoption of the services. This presentation takes a view of what a successful rollout across campus could look like, for the community members that will be involved, including Teaching/Instructional staff, Students and Campus Communications. 

Register here