It’s less than 48 hours since Office 365 for education launched around the world but already I’m building up a nice list of frequently asked questions, first of which is “what happens when my trial expires?”.

30-day Trial

Every Office 365 for education customer has to sign up for the 30-day trial before they get access to add extra licenses. This is so we can verify that you’re an eligible academic institution. To get you started we provide 50 trial A3 plan licenses; if you go to the licenses section in the Microsoft Online Services Admin Portal you’ll see something similar to this:

Once you’ve verified your eligibility you’ll get access to the purchasing section to be able to add in more licenses. There are several to choose from:

You need to purchase the licenses you want to use with your users from this portal as the trial licenses cannot be extended. At the end of trial period, if you’ve not purchased any additional plans, your trial licenses will expire and you may lose access to some of the services.

Unlike Live@edu, where there were no plans, Office 365 for education offers a number of different plans and prices to suit your requirements which is why you must choose which plans to purchase; we don’t make that decision for you.

Once you’ve purchased the licenses you need you’ll see in the billing and subscription management section that you have a number of subscriptions running, including the original trial licenses that will expire 30 days after signing up:

When you go to manage one of your users you’ll be able to assign the licenses you’ve purchased and can disregard the trial licenses:

If you’ve not already, you can sign up for the free 30-day trial of Office 365 for education at http://education.office365.com and get started with your deployment today!

Have you signed up for the trial?

Tell us what you’re planning to do with Office 365 for education in your institution in the comments!

Just a few hours ago Office 365 for education launched around the world so we thought it might be a good time to give you a quick tour of what you can expect to find. So, sit back and relax as my colleague Damon introduces you to Office 365!

Don’t forget that you can sign up for the 30-day trial absolutely free which will give you the chance to experience this first hand. Just head over to the new website at http://education.office365.com to get started.

Starting today, Microsoft Office 365 for education is available, providing the world’s best productivity, communications and collaboration experiences to schools at no cost.  

“The cloud and online learning are key trends transforming education today. Office 365 for education delivers a holistic collaboration platform that will change the game,” said Anthony Salcito, vice president of worldwide education, Microsoft. “As schools face ever-tightening budgets and the pressure to innovate, we are offering enterprise quality technology for free that will modernize teaching practices and help prepare students for the jobs of tomorrow.”

At BETT 2011 we announced that Office 365 would be coming to our education customers – an upgrade for the current Live@edu service used by over 22M users worldwide. Over the last few months some of our early adopter customers, including University of Dundee, Westminster University and The Schools Network (formerly SSAT) have been deploying this upgraded service and they’re really happy with the results.

“The university selected Office 365 over Google Apps because it gives us a robust enterprise-class platform for developing a radical new approach to collaboration and communication that goes far beyond email��

Tom Mortimer, Director, Information and Communication Services, University of Dundee

As of right now education institutions can sign up for the Office 365 for education 30-day trial for free via the Office 365 website.

Classrooms Without Boundaries

Office 365 allows schools to teach from virtually anywhere*, reach more students, teach software skills employers are looking for and provide enterprise-class tools that reduce IT costs.

Students can engage in ad-hoc instant messaging or video chats to collaborate on class projects in real time, regardless of where they are working or on what device. They can create documents with Office Web Apps that provide the same features as the desktop version of Microsoft Office, share class notes by synchronizing OneNote notebooks, and create digital portfolios.

Teachers can create curriculum, record lectures and publish them on online class sites in the cloud where students are able to view, open, produce, edit and share their homework. Office 365 provides new ways to extend classroom teaching time and distance learning, tutor students online, and whiteboard ideas.

Educational institutions and parents will get peace of mind knowing students’ content and personal data are protected and won’t be scanned for advertising purposes, thanks to a rich set of privacy, security and protection capabilities that adhere to federal laws.

School IT departments can save money and free up more critical time by counting on Microsoft to manage routine tasks such as applying server updates and software upgrades. With the influx of digital content, datacentre demands and lessened and with 25GB mailboxes, people won’t be forced to purge files.

*An appropriate device, Internet connection, supported browser and/or carrier network connectivity are required. Data charges may apply.

What should I do now?

http://education.office365.com

Education institutions currently using the Microsoft Live@edu platform will be upgraded to Office 365 beginning this summer.

In Office 365 for education, as it stands today, creating shared mailboxes involves using Windows PowerShell which, to the uninitiated, can be complex task. As an aside, it’s worth getting to grips with PowerShell as it’s a great way to aid managing the service!

Shared mailboxes are useful for generic aliases, for example “reception@myschool.sch.uk” or “itservices@myuniversity.ac.uk” as they provide a way to give multiple users access to a mailbox without having to be an alias of somebody’s own personal mailbox; this has the knock-on benefit that should your receptionist, or IT services team leave, the shared mailbox remains for their successors to pick up – no downtime or change of aliases for your end users.

Each shared mailbox has a 5GB limit, and does not require a licence. The great news is that there is a free tool that makes creating shared mailboxes in Office 365 for education much easier. Introducing the GUI-based Shared Mailbox Tool…

The free download provides a simple way to create shared mailboxes for your users, check out the Office 365 community Wiki for the step-by-step guide on how to use the tool:

Create Shared Mailboxes with GUI-based Tool

Once you’ve configured your shared mailboxes, why not take a look at how to use them in Office 365 via OWA.

If you’re using non-federated identities with Office 365 for education you will find that by default password expiry is enabled, meaning every 90 days you’ll be required to pick a new password. While the duration of this is not configurable, it is possible to disable the feature for some or all of your users.

Remote PowerShell

To do this you’re going to need to connect to your Office 365 tenant using remote PowerShell. Make sure you’ve downloaded the necessary PowerShell cmdlets, and familiarised yourself with them.

For an individual user:

To disable password expiry for an individual user, run the following code:

   1: Set-MsolUser –UserPrincipalName <UPNName> -PasswordNeverExpires $True 

  For example, if your user’s UPN is aylakol@contoso.edu the code would look like:

   1: Set-MsolUser –UserPrincipalName aylakol@contoso.edu -PasswordNeverExpires $True 

For all users:

To disable password expiry for all of your users, run the following code:

   1: Get-MsolUser | Set-MsolUser –PasswordNeverExpires $True 

That’s it! Now your users won’t be prompted to reset their passwords after 90 days.

If you’re looking for a more advanced scenario where your passwords are managed by your local Active Directory then take a look at federated identity in Office 365 with Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 – a server role that enables you to authenticate against your AD for access to Office 365 for education.