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The Office 365 upgrade builds on your existing Live@edu deployment—mailboxes, calendars, and contacts do not move, and there is no need to re-provision accounts. We provide the tools and guidance at each stage—simply follow along by using the upgrade planning worksheet. Use it to estimate how much time you will need for the key tasks required before, during and after the upgrade.

There’s all sorts of information that schools need to provide to parents, and traditionally this has resulted in copious amounts of paper being given to students to put in their bag, often never to be seen again! Increasingly schools have turned to their websites, or even social networking sites like Twitter, to distribute this information but sometimes there are things schools need to distribute, but don’t want to make fully public. Let’s take a look at how we can enable parent access to SharePoint Online using PALs.

Scenarios

What sort of information am I talking about? Here’s a few examples:

• Internal school contact information – this could be information on how to contact a particular form tutor, or an up to date staff listing, etc.
• Event dates – some events like an open evening you want to promote to the world, but other events such as sports day or parents evening you might want to make available to a more limited audience.
• School trip information – creating a dedicated team site for a particular school trip that you can grant parents access to in order to share important information such as the trip itinerary, contact information, blogs, photos, etc. can be a great way to keep in touch with home, but not tell the whole world about it!

Terminology

There is a lot of jargon in the IT world, so to make it easy here’s a few definitions:

• PAL – partner access licence. Each SharePoint Online tenant in Office 365 for education gets 10,000 of these included.
• External User – another name for someone that doesn’t exist as a licenced user object in Office 365. Typically your staff and students will have SharePoint Online licences, but as parents can’t be given these licenses they are external users. External users are invited by email address. The email address can be from any domain, but must be associated with a Microsoft Account. Each External User consumes one PAL.
• External Contact – these represent people outside of your institution who can be displayed in the shared address book (GAL). They don’t have a mailbox in Exchange Online, and can’t sign in to your domain. They are also totally separate from External Users.

3 Simple Steps

Enabling this functionality can be done in three simple steps:

1. Enable external sharing for SharePoint Online – by default SharePoint Online does not allow external users. To enable the potential for external users to be invited to any of the sit collections in your environment you need to enable the feature.
2. Activate external sharing for a site collection – after the SharePoint Online environment has been set to allow external sharing, site collection administrators can choose whether or not to allow external users to be invited to sites in their site collections.
3. Share your site with external users – now that you’ve activated external sharing, and allowed it on your chosen site collection(s), you can start sharing it with people.

Considerations

Keep in mind that once you invite external users to your site, it is easy to grant them permission to other sites. Ensure that you know the identity of users who are invited through e-mail and consider confirming their identity before granting an external user access to content.

An external user invitation can be accepted only one time. The invitation email can be forwarded to another recipient who can use the invitation to access the SharePoint site. However, after the e-mail invitation has been accepted, it expires.

If you attempt to invite an external user to use your site when your company has set SharePoint Online to deny external users, you will see a note in the Share Site box that that says, “Invitations to users outside your organization are currently disabled.”

To use an email address, such as *.contoso.com, to log on to a SharePoint Online site, the email address must first be associated with Microsoft account. You can register an email address with your Microsoft account by following the steps at this website.

More Info

You can read up on this topic in a few different places:

• SharePoint Online – Share a site with external users.
• Did you know you can share? SharePoint Online’s External Sharing Capabilities.
• SharePoint Online Service Description.

Have you seen the good news?  Skype and Messenger are coming together.  Soon millions of Messenger users will be able to reach their Messenger friends on Skype.  By updating to Skype, Messenger users can instant message and video call their Messenger friends plus a whole lot more.  Skype will become the preferred choice for all of our users’ communication needs.  We will retire Messenger in all countries worldwide in the first quarter of 2013, with the exception of mainland China.  Learn more about this exciting change.

So, what does this mean for Microsoft Live@edu institutions?  There are multiple ways Live@edu users leverage Windows Live Messenger today:

• Messenger client
• Outlook Web App chat feature
• Custom applications using Messenger API’s

Messenger Client

The Messenger client will be retired in the first quarter of 2013.  As the Skype blog post indicates, users can download the latest version of Skype now and begin taking advantage of the great features.  When Windows Live Messenger is retired, users will be prompted to install Skype on their desktop.

Note: Schools that want a centralized IT deployment of Skype to desktops can download the image and use System Center Configuration Manager to remotely manage desktops.

There are a few differences between Messenger and Skype client features and capabilities.  These include:

• Groups created in Messenger will need to be recreated in Skype
• File sharing capability does not work across Messenger and Skype sessions
• New buddies created in Skype will not show up in Messenger or OWA

Outlook Web App Chat

Windows Live@edu allows users to access email in a browser, using Outlook Web App (OWA).  The contact list in OWA allows user to chat with friends and colleagues connected to Messenger.

Following the update to Skype, contacts will continue to be accessible via the contact list in OWA, just as they are today.  The only difference being new buddies created in Skype will not show up in the OWA contact list.

Note: Administrators can disable the chat feature in Outlook Web App by applying a policy to some or all mailboxes.

Custom applications using Messenger API’s

Today, third party applications leverage the Messenger API’s to do custom integration of Messenger into line of business applications and services.  Following the update to Skype, these custom applications will have a limited life.  Schools using third party applications integrated with Messenger will want to look for alternative solutions to meet their academic needs.

Live@edu upgrade to Office 365

While this Skype news is exciting for current Messenger users, it is equally exciting to remind Live@edu institutions of the pending upgrade of Live@edu to Office 365.  Office 365 for education extends your Live@edu investment providing free email, instant messaging, group video and voice chat, and online document viewing and editing.  Upgrade to Office 365 today!