If you’re looking at deploying Office 365 for education at your institution, but you’re wondering what the best way to prepare is, then look no further!

Over on the phenomenally useful Office 365 community there is a wiki page that steps through all the things you need to think about when preparing for an Office 365 deployment:

1. Familiarize yourself with Office 365 features
2. Keep it simple
3. Plan your tenant carefully
4. Network readiness
5. Directory clean-up and preparation
6. Desktop
7. Mail migration, readiness and performance
8. Planning for a hybrid configuration
9. Admin support and use training
10. Public folders
11. Server-side Exchange applications

Get your deployment to a great start today by being prepared!

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Your tips please!

Have you deployed Office 365 for education at your institution over the summer break? Tell us your best and most useful tips for deployment in the comments.

Great news from Georgia!  GSU has rolled out Office 365 as a replacement for their legacy GroupWise environment and users are now enjoying anytime, anywhere, any device access to their email and other collaborative services.

I urge you to check out the case study, here are a few choice quotes:

"There were several problems with Google Mail....In addition to functionality limitations, Google Mail had legal issues that could not enable us to restrict and store data within the United States, as policy requires us to. We also wanted support for retention and e-discovery policies that enterprise-class solutions often offer but that Google wasn’t even willing to talk to us about.”

"The project went very smoothly. I mean, we completed the final push in just one weekend,” says Keith Campbell, Director of Technology Engineering at Georgia State University. “I think this went about as effortlessly as any large email migration can go.”

"When we look at our total cost of ownership of GroupWise versus Office 365, we estimate we will easily save about [US]$1 million in the first five years."

"Office 365 has given us professional-quality tools at a great value, robust reliability and security, and an extensible platform that we add communication and collaboration services to as the university’s needs grow. Given all these advantages, I think the Office 365 migration is one of the best projects this organization has ever undertaken."

We thank GSU for their business and partnership and we are both looking forward to seeing the impact we can have with their teaching and learning.

Enjoy!

Jonny

Getting real time feedback from your students and staff can be a challenge. I’m a firm believer in finding better ways to engage students and teachers and the new Excel Web App in SharePoint Online (at which you can take a sneak peak in the new Office 365 preview) has a new feature that can help. Forms!

My colleagues in the US team have written a great blog post introducing the new feature but I thought I would take a moment to explore how this can be used in the classroom and be made really accessible to your students and teachers.

Lets have a look at what some things you might want to use forms for:

• A lecturer wanting to get opinion and feedback about a lecture immediately after it finishes.
• A group of students doing a data collection exercise with their classmates.
• A senior leader wanting to get feedback from parents about a school event (i.e. sports day, school theatre production)
• A teacher running a competition.

The beauty of forms in the new Excel Web App is that they can be shared in a few clicks, and accessed on a variety of devices, making it easy for users with laptops, tablet devices, smart phones or pretty much any device with a browser to contribute.

I won’t re-cover how to create a new form, you can read up on that at the US team blog – instead, I’ll pick up at the point where you’ve created your form and are ready to share it with people.

Once you’re sure you’ve finished editing your form, click the “Get a Link” button as highlighted below:

This will provide you with a really long (and pretty unfriendly) URL for you to share out:

Use your favourite URL shortener to turn this into an easier URL to share, for example: http://aka.ms/vumdyw.

Another great way to make this even more accessible; for example to include in a PowerPoint presentation or on a poster, would be to turn this into a Microsoft Tag or QR code to allow users to scan and complete from their mobile devices!

Hopefully the preview will give you a surge of great ideas that you’ll be able to put into action with these new features. Office 365 for education is available today and you can sign up for the A2 plan which includes Exchange Online, Lync Online, SharePoint Online and the Office Web Apps for free.

You can also preview the next version of Office 365 and Office.

If you’re deploying Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 in your institution to enable single sign-on you might want to customize the default look and feel with some custom text, logos and colours to make it fit in with your brand and to make it more familiar to your users.

Or just something different from the norm:

Useful Resources

Helpfully, there are some places you can go to find how to do this:

• Customizing the AD FS 2.0 Sign-in Web Pages
• Customizing the AD FS 2.0 Sign-In Pages Using Web.config
• ASP.NET Master Pages

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How have you themed yours?

Have you changed your sign-in page to look different? Show us in the comments!

Today we are going to highlight one of the features in the Excel Web Apps, which can be found as part of the new Office 365 demo environment. The Office Web apps are part of the SharePoint Online experience and can be used to either create new content or edit existing Office documents once they have been posted. While the Web Apps seamlessly integrate themselves throughout the SharePoint Online experience for this example we are going to focus on the creation of new content in SkyDrive Pro.

One of the first things you should notice upon logging into the new Office 365 experience is the new title bar. The title bar is consistent throughout the web properties making it much easier for you to find your way through all of the services you have been licensed for (if you are aren’t licensed for it the option won’t be available in the title bar.

Now that we have selected the SkyDrive Pro option highlighted above, we can go ahead and start our new
Excel workbook, by clicking ‘new document’ and then choosing Excel Workbook.

We are then prompted to name that workbook, for this example we will use Formtest.xlsx

A new workbook is immediately created for us, and we just need another step to create my web form.

From the ribbon, we choose ‘Form’ and then ‘New Form’.

We are presented with a pop-out dialogue to create our form
We can fill in the title, description and begin adding questions.
We also have a number of question choices available to us.

Please take a moment to fill out the form and share your thoughts - http://bit.ly/QHFZqu