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

A huge request I get from my education customers deploying Office 365 for Education is how do you filter out OUs, Domains or users from a Dirsync Appliance?  The answer prior to this week was you could enable filtering within Dirsync however it was in an unsupported manner.  

 

Great news now that soft-delete has been enabled in Office 365 last week you now have to ability to ‘rollback’ deleted users from the tenant for up to 30 days.  With this new capability, we also now support Dirsync filtering at the OU, Domain or attribute level.

 

Soft-Delete capability

 

new dialog box when you delete a user

 

New restore option

 

 

Restored account

 

Dirsync filtering

To enable Dirsync filtering:

 

1) On the Dirsync Server, Run MIISCLIENT.exe from \Program Files\Microsoft Online Directory Sync\SYNCBUS\Synchronization Service\UIShell for 64-bit

MIISclient running

 

2) Click Management Agents

3) Double click ‘SourceAD’

4) Click ‘Configure Directory Partitions’

5) Uncheck OUs or Domains you don’t want to sync over

Filter by AD partitions

 

6) Go to Step 8 below

 

To filter by Attribute:

Change step 4 above to:

4) Click ‘Configure Connector Filter’

5) Select ‘user’ under ‘Data Source Object Type’ and New. Pick an attribute to filter on such as ‘extensionAtrribute1’ and put in a value like ‘NoSync’

Example: Dirsync filters all objects with extensionAttribute1=NoSync

 

6) Click ‘Add Condition’

7) Click OK

8) Perform Full Sync

Click Management Agent

SourceAD

Run

Full Import Full Sync

 

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

As more and more education institutions take advantage of Office 365 for education’s powerful capabilities a question that comes up is: how can you script license assignment for your staff, students and alumni so that you don’t have to manually go through the process each time you enroll new users?

Thankfully there are a couple of great blog posts that talk about how to go about doing this, and which licenses you need for education.

For quick reference, the plans relevant to education customers are:

Academic Plans (A Plans)

STANDARDPACK_STUDENT	Microsoft Office 365 Plan A1 for Students*
STANDARDPACK_FACULTY	Microsoft Office 365 Plan A1 for Faculty*
STANDARDWOFFPACK_STUDENT	Microsoft Office 365 Plan A2 for Students
ENTERPRISEPACK_STUDENT	Microsoft Office 365 Plan A3 for Students
ENTERPRISEPACKWITHSCAL_STUDENT	Microsoft Office 365 Plan A4 for Students
STANDARDWOFFPACK_FACULTY	Microsoft Office 365 Plan A2 for Faculty
ENTERPRISEPACK_FACULTY	Microsoft Office 365 Plan A3 for Faculty
ENTERPRISEPACKWITHSCAL_FACULTY	Microsoft Office 365 Plan A4 for Faculty

*Microsoft Office 365 Plan A1 is superseded by Plan A2. 

Components

EXCHANGESTANDARD_ALUMNI	Exchange Online (Plan 1) for Alumni
EXCHANGESTANDARD_STUDENT	Exchange Online (Plan 1) for Students
EXCHANGESTANDARD_FACULTY	Exchange Online (Plan 1) for Faculty
EXCHANGEENTERPRISE_STUDENT	Exchange Online (Plan 2) for Students
EXCHANGEENTERPRISE_FACULTY	Exchange Online (Plan 2) for Faculty
MCOIMP_STUDENT	Lync Online (Plan 1) for Students
MCOIMP_FACULTY	Lync Online (Plan 1) for Faculty
MCOSTANDARD_STUDENT	Lync Online (Plan 2) for Students
MCOSTANDARD_FACULTY	Lync Online (Plan 2) for Faculty
SHAREPOINTSTANDARD_FACULTY	SharePoint Online (Plan 1) for Faculty
SHAREPOINTENTERPRISE_STUDENT	SharePoint Online (Plan 2) for Students
SHAREPOINTENTERPRISE_FACULTY	SharePoint Online (Plan 2) for Faculty
SHAREPOINTEXTRANET_FACULTY	SharePoint Online Partner Access for EDU
SHAREPOINTSTORAGE_FACULTY	SharePoint Online Storage
WACSHAREPOINTSTD_FACULTY	Office Web Apps (Plan 1) For Faculty
WACSHAREPOINTENT_FACULTY	Office Web Apps (Plan 2) For Faculty
OFFICESUBSCRIPTION	Office Professional Plus
SHAREPOINTEDU	N/A – SharePoint Online

More Reading

You might like to read up on these articles:

• Active Directory Synchronisation with Office 365
• Active Directory Federation
• Windows PowerShell for Single Sign On

 

We continue to look at better ways to do license assignment in EDU. The initial scripts provide quick way to do assignment but lacked in granularity. When a customer wants to apply licenses we wanted to look at the source AD to track against a single attribute for the license assignment.

Please follow the instructions in this blog. In it you will prepare AD including changing the script if the attribute (Employee attribute) is not sufficient for your needs). The process looks like the below.

 

 

To assign the licenses you will need to provide related data sources that consists of the following components:

1. An object identifier
2. An operational attribute that describes the SKU you want to assign and the service plans you want to disable

Please remember to use the appropriate SKU for assignment of licenses

SKU	DisplayName
ENTERPRISEPACK	Microsoft Office 365 Plan E3
ENTERPRISEPACKLRG	Microsoft Office 365 Plan E3
ENTERPRISEWITHSCAL	Microsoft Office 365 Plan E4
EXCHANGEENTERPRISE	Exchange Online Plan 2
EXCHANGELITE	Exchange Online P1
EXCHANGESTANDARD	Exchange Online Plan 1
EXCHANGETELCO	Exchange Online POP
MCOIMP	Lync Online Plan 1
MCOLITE	Lync Online P1
MCOSTANDARD	Lync Online Plan 2
OFFICESUBSCRIPTION	Office Professional Plus
SHAREPOINTEDU	N/A - SharePoint Online
SHAREPOINTENTERPRISE	SharePoint Online Plan 2
SHAREPOINTEXTRANET	SharePoint Online Partner Access
SHAREPOINTLITE	SharePoint Online P1
SHAREPOINTSTANDARD	SharePoint Online Plan 1
SHAREPOINTSTORAGE	SharePoint Online Storage
SHAREPOINTWACADDON	SharePoint Online WAC Edit
SHAREPOINTWITHPROJ	SharePoint and Project Suite
WACSHAREPOINTENT	Office Web Apps with SharePoint Plan 2
WACSHAREPOINTSTD	Office Web Apps with SharePoint Plan 1
STANDARDPACK_STUDENT	Microsoft Office 365 Plan A1 for Students
STANDARDWOFFPACK_STUDENT	Microsoft Office 365 Plan A2 for Students
ENTERPRISEPACK_STUDENT	Microsoft Office 365 Plan A3 for Students
ENTERPRISEWITHSCAL_STUDENT	Microsoft Office 365 Plan A4 for Students
STANDARDPACK_FACULTY	Microsoft Office 365 Plan A1 for Faculty
STANDARDWOFFPACK_FACULTY	Microsoft Office 365 Plan A2 for Faculty
ENTERPRISEPACK_FACULTY	Microsoft Office 365 Plan A3 for Faculty
ENTERPRISEWITHSCAL_FACULTY	Microsoft Office 365 Plan A4 for Faculty
EXCHANGESTANDARD_ALUMNI	Exchange Online (Plan 1) for Alumni
EXCHANGESTANDARD_STUDENT	Exchange Online (Plan 1) for Students
EXCHANGESTANDARD_FACULTY	Exchange Online (Plan 1) for Faculty
EXCHANGEENTERPRISE_STUDENT	Exchange Online (Plan 2) for Students
EXCHANGEENTERPRISE_FACULTY	Exchange Online (Plan 2) for Faculty
MCOIMP_STUDENT	Lync Online (Plan 1) for Students
MCOIMP_FACULTY	Lync Online (Plan 1) for Faculty
MCOSTANDARD_STUDENT	Lync Online (Plan 2) for Students
MCOSTANDARD_FACULTY	Lync Online (Plan 2) for Faculty
SHAREPOINTSTANDARD_FACULTY	SharePoint Online (Plan 1) for Faculty
SHAREPOINTENTERPRISE_STUDENT	SharePoint Online (Plan 2) for Students
SHAREPOINTENTERPRISE_FACULTY	SharePoint Online (Plan 2) for Faculty
SHAREPOINTEXTRANET_FACULTY	SharePoint Online Partner Access for EDU
SHAREPOINTSTORAGE_FACULTY	SharePoint Online Storage
WACSHAREPOINTSTD_FACULTY	Office Web Apps (Plan 1) For Faculty
WACSHAREPOINTENT_FACULTY	Office Web Apps (Plan 2) For Faculty