As of June 27^th Microsoft introduced officially Office 365 for education, and while there is a wealth of information currently available you may still have questions as to what features are included and how to get started.  In this article we will try to address those questions for you.

What features are included in Office 365 for education’s free offering?

Office 365 for education like Office 365 for enterprise, is made of a combination of plans and suites. You have individual plans like Exchange Online Plan 1 or SharePoint Plan 2, as well as various other options.  Microsoft has built bundles or suites of these individual plans for our customers.  In education, there are three suites available – A2, A3 and A4.  In order to understand what these offers are at a high level you can take a look at the compare plans section for Office 365 for education, found here.  For some users, this may be enough information to decide, but what if you really want to get into the details.  Here is a simple breakdown of the plans–

Now that you have this information please review the Service Descriptions for Office 365 (yes they are the same for education as the enterprise), and you’ll understand all of the great features that Office 365 has to offer.  

How to order Office 365 through the web portal

 So you have read all through all of the service descriptions and you are ready to move forward with Office 365.  At this point you have a choice to make order through your volume license agreement of order through the web portal.  If you want to order through your volume license agreement (EES), please contact either your reseller or Microsoft representative.  If you want to order directly through the Microsoft Online services portal please keep reading.  A few things to note if you choose the online services portal –

1. All orders start as trials licenses, you will be provided 25 faculty and staff licenses as well as 25 student licenses, of Plan A3.
2. If you follow the instructions and links provided here you will be able to convert to a production environment, this is not an option if you choose the enterprise trial.
3. You must accept the Microsoft Online Services Agreement which is part of the sign-up process

You can start your trial environment for Office 365 for education here. You can see screen shots of the entire process in the embeded content below.

After two weeks you will be able to add production licenses through the administrator console, under the purchase section (even the free A2 SKUs).  

If you are still looking for more information on where to go from here, check out the Trial Guide - Learn more.

Janet is helping the sector harness the benefits of cloud-based Microsoft Office 365 for education through initial legal support and by agreeing a customised set of licensing documents with Microsoft, saving the sector time and money.

A number of universities have worked with Janet in the production of this pack, which is being made available to the HE and FE sector.  This will help those in the sector move to collaborative cloud services for staff, student and alumni, for email, document storage and calendars.

Dan Perry, Director of Product & Marketing at Janet commented:

"Under tight timescales, and working in partnership with interested universities, we've produced a document pack for immediate use that will work for the vast majority of the sector, particularly those institutions implementing Office 365 this summer.  Together with the development of a single agreement on behalf of the sector for Microsoft cloud services (including Office 365) launching in the autumn, this work will save the sector time and money by reducing duplication of legal effort and harnessing economies of scale.

"In response to key priorities raised by the sector we have focused special attention on concerns of cloud data transfer and security."

Janet is also investigating offering similar support for those on the Janet network wishing to work with other leading cloud providers.  Earlier this year Janet's Brokerage arm launched a framework to help institutions move their infrastructure to the cloud, which has received high interest from the community and suppliers alike.

You can find out more about Janet’s work with Microsoft by visiting their Microsoft Collaboration page.

Original post at the Janet website.

We have released documentation for Shibboleth support, marking the public availability for Shibboleth integration into Office 365!  You can find the reference here.  This provides a customer with the ability to provide their Active Directory users with single sign-on experience by using Shibboleth Identity Provider as their preferred Security Token Service (STS).

The scenarios covered for support include:

1. Web-based clients such as Outlook Web Access for Exchange and SharePoint Online. 

2. Rich client support including IMAP, POP, EAS, MAP, Outlook 2007, Thunderbird 8 and 9, iPhone, and Windows Phone (These options need to support basic authentication to Exchange for access method and we also need Enhanced Client Protocol (ECP) to be deployed).

All other clients are not support in this SSO scenario with Shibboleth as an iDP.

To setup this configuration you’ll need to setup the following:

1. Configure Shibboleth for use with single sign-on.
2. Install Windows PowerShell for single sign-on with Shibboleth
3. Set up a trust between Shibboleth and Windows Azure AD
4. Follow the detailed instructions in Directory synchronization roadmap to prepare for, activate, install a tool, and verify directory synchronization.
5. Verify single sign-on with Shibboleth

Please contact your Microsoft account team on how to get a customer supported for Shibboleth.

I had a customer recently ask me about removing forwarding. There are two steps to do this the first is to remove the UI settings and the other to change the mailbox settings. The original article written for Live@edu was a little different as the rule set has changed in Office 365. I owe my efforts to the original article here.

Please use the following instructions to disable forwarding in Office 365:

1. Create new role which parent is “MyBaseOptions”

New-ManagementRole -Parent MyBaseOptions -Name NewMyBaseOptions

2. Remove some options related “forwarding” in “Set-Mailbox”

Set-ManagementRoleEntry NewMyBaseOptions\Set-Mailbox -Parameters DeliverToMailboxAndForward,ForwardingAddress,ForwardingSmtpAddress -RemoveParameter

3.Create new role assignment policy which contains “NewMyBaseOptions”

New-RoleAssignmentPolicy -Name DenyForwardingRoleAssignmentPolicy -Roles NewMyBaseOptions,MyContactInformation, MyRetentionPolicies,MyMailSubscriptions,MyTextMessaging,MyVoiceMail,MyDistributionGroupMembership,

MyDistributionGroups, MyProfileInformation

4. Assign the new policy to the appropriate mailbox.

Set-Mailbox –Identity XXX -RoleAssignmentPolicy DenyForwardingRoleAssignmentPolicy

Of course if you have multiple user sets then create different policies and assign. For example if you want some to forward and some not to create two policies.

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.