“The Contoso Learning Companion is a modern Windows 8 application built to work with SharePoint 2010 and 2013. It uses SharePoint sites as collaboration spaces for classes and study groups and integrates with the popular OneNote application for lessons and assignments. This popular starter kit provides everything you need to deliver tailored Windows 8 solutions for SharePoint.”

You can read more about this sample solution that we built here.  Then, suitably excited, download it for free from here.

Enjoy!

Jonny

With emphasis of services and devices our priorities are adapting to Office on your terms illustrated by today’s announcement of Office 365 University!  Office 365 is the next bold step in Microsoft’s transformation to a devices and services company noted in Steve Ballmer’s blog post today - for the first time, consumers can subscribe to Office as a service instead of purchasing Office as a piece of software to install.   

The new Office combined with Office 365 Education is a Social packed duo including your Personal sites, feeds, communities, follows, likes, and more to announce soon!  A recent example at Princeton University where they leveraged Office 365 to develop a cool social program -- a silent disco – a truly interactive experience for 2,700 students and alumni.  There was live blogging with pictures, funny comments and text, all on a secure network and streaming video to students not able to attend, as well as alumni off campus.

How can I Participate?  Check out Timeto365 a new crowd-sourced web site where people can get tips, tricks, ideas and inspiration from around the world!

Don’t miss the Microsoft community  - a place to find answer, share ideas, solve problems and most of all help you get the most out of your technology.

OK,can you tell me what is included in Office 365 University and Office 365 for
Education??!!

So what is the difference between Office 365 for education and Office 365 University?

• Office 365 A3-A4 suites and  Office 365 ProPlus (w15) are institutional offers sold via VL or Direct that include enterprise cloud services like SharePoint with SkyDrive Pro, Lync and Office, in addition to all Office applications. Office 365 Education includes full commercial use rights.
• Office 365 University is sold at retail and available to individual university and college students. Office 365 University offers Office applications and cloud consumer services such as SkyDrive and Skype, and it does not include commercial use rights. The table below illustrates the main differences.

Tell me, how will Office 365 University interact with Office 365 Education?

Students who have any consumer Office 365 SKU can connect to their school’s Office 365 for education services from the same machine and Office install by changing their login credentials from a Microsoft Account to an OrgID account. Their Office applications will be able to save to SharePoint Online and Outlook can be connected to their Exchange Online mailbox provided by the institution. Office 365 University does not include a Lync client.

Should the Office 365 University offer replace the HUP and WAH programs?

Home Use Program (HUP) and Work at Home Rights (WAH) are the appropriate and most cost-effective programs for faculty and staff to acquire Office. Only higher ed. faculty and staff not currently covered by these programs should consider Office 365 University.

Enjoy the NEW Office!!

If you’re in the UK (other countries are available) you’ll probably look out of your window this morning and see something like this:

Teachers and pupils up and down the country tune into their local radio stations eagerly awaiting news of school closures, crossing fingers and toes that theirs is on the list. Traditionally when snow hits and schools close it’s seen as a free day because communication grinds to a halt.

I’ve heard stories of broadband connections to schools being swamped and failing as people scramble to get to the school website for updates, only to find an error as the server’s offline or the, hitherto totally reliable, mail server develops a problem meaning you can’t send any email. Maybe it’s time to look at different ways to keep the school functioning when the mercury falls below zero?

Office 365 for education

Office 365 for education can help get you out of this sticky situation in a number of ways:

• Exchange Online gives every one of your pupils and teachers a 25GB mailbox hosted in a Microsoft datacentre that is accessible 24x7 from anywhere. You can even sync it to your smartphone, tablet device or pretty much anything that supports IMAP, or Exchange ActiveSync.
• Lync Online provides everyone with the means to have instant message conversations, audio and video chats, share content, collaborate in a whiteboard, and gives everyone their own “presence” to let others know their availability. Clients are available for most major platforms and because Lync Online is hosted by Microsoft it is accessible anywhere, all the time!
• SharePoint Online (with the Office Web Apps) is a great place to move your processes and documents. By making use of the libraries and workflows in SharePoint Online you can finally get rid of those paper forms and tiny file shares – it’s possible to store up to 25TB of data in the cloud. Teachers can set homework assignments, provide resources, share notes, and all sorts of other great things via SharePoint Online. Every user also gets their own personal storage space to keep their files, tag their favourite content, or even write a blog.

Just because you’re outside the classroom doesn’t mean teaching and learning has to stop! Here are a few examples:

• The head teacher needs to call a meeting of all staff to brief them on the snow process. They send out a calendar invite using the Lync Online web scheduler and Exchange Online to all the teachers for them to join a meeting online using Lync. The head can then present some slides, and attach a hand-out to the meeting for the teachers to download. Also, the head can record the meeting and upload the recording to the staff area in SharePoint Online for people who couldn’t make the meeting to review at their leisure.
• A sixth form teacher had planned to run a revision session for some A-Level students but due to the closure nobody can get in. Instead of cancelling the session the teacher can send out invites to the students using the web scheduler and host the meeting online using Lync. The teacher can share audio, video, whiteboard and presentation content – even the whole desktop if needed. Again, the session can be recorded and uploaded to SharePoint Online for later review.
• A teacher who’d set a homework deadline of the day the school closed can still collect in homework assignments via SharePoint Online by getting pupils to upload their work from home, rather than print it out to bring in. The teacher can mark the work electronically using the Office Web Apps in SharePoint Online and send feedback to the pupils easily.

You can sign up for Office 365 for education for free today! Every signup gets a 30 day free trial of the enhanced A3 plan, which includes a downloadable copy of Office Professional Plus 2010.

As a technical guy, I spend most of my days talking to customers about how they can deploy Office 365 for education, or answering questions about what the service can do. In this guest post, our resident star Mandeep Atwal talks about how schools are actually using Lync Online in the classroom.

Today’s workforce and workplace is mobile. In order to prepare students to succeed, we need to encourage and enable them to become mobile learners and active participants beyond the walls of the classroom. They can and they want to learn in different places, not only in the real-world, but also in virtual environments or a combination of both. Blended learning combines the traditional face-to-face classroom with online instruction. Office 365 for education is a great way to prepare your students to succeed in all types of environments.

How are schools using Office 365 for education?

With Lync you can connect with others through instant messaging (IM), video and audio calls, and online meetings. Oakswood Junior have used Lync to set up an online numeracy support group. Making use of Lync students are using the chat feature to provide support to one another on homework issues. Lync can be accessed by students at home and in school and teachers are using the status tool feature as an ‘Assessment for Learning’ strategy to monitor progress. Hence, if students set their status to red they require assistance, if they show green they know the answer and are available to help others and if they display amber they are still working on the learning activity.

Check out this two minute innovid tutorial below to see how easy it is to start teaching in the cloud with Lync Online:

Office 365 for education is free for students and staff, and you can sign up for a free trial online, today!

You can read more from Mandeep over on the UK Teachers blog.

How are you using Office 365 for education in the classroom?

Get in touch in the comments with your story and tips for using Office 365 for education in the classroom – we’d love to hear from you!

In our last post our guest contributor Mandeep Atwal talked about using Lync client to support assessment for learning strategy in the classroom. I thought this was a great post as Lync Online is part of Office 365 for education and users can use Lync client on the desktop to communicate with others easily.

In this post I’m going to talk about how you can customise the status indicators in Lync desktop client to show something more meaningful than the default settings:

I’ll cover how to configure this for an individual user, but it is possible to make this change across your network for every user who uses Lync client, jump to the end of this post for the links! This only affects the Lync desktop client (2010 and 2013) not the web app or mobile clients.

This guide talks about editing your registry. Editing the registry can have unintended and serious consequences to your computer – proceed with caution! If you do not understand what editing the registry means, please speak to your IT administrator before making any changes.

1. Define your custom status in a simple XML file, like:

   <?xml version="1.0"?> <customStates xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/09/2009/communicator/customStates"> 
     < customState ID="1" availability="Busy">
       <activity LCID="1033">Help me please!</activity>
     </customState>
     < customState ID="2" availability="Online">
       <activity LCID="1033">I've got the answer.</activity>
     </customState>
     < customState ID="3" availability="do-not-disturb">
       <activity LCID="1033">I'm still working.</activity>
     </customState>
   < /customStates>

   Save this as “presence.xml” in a folder that is readable by your users; in this example we’ll place it in C:\Windows.

2. We then need to disable the requirement for HTTPS and allow Lync to read a local file.

Lync 2010

Fire up your Registry Editor and navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\Communicator and create a new REG_DWORD value named EnableSIPHighSecurityMode, value = 0.

Also create a REG_SZ value called CustomStateURL in the same place, with the value file:///C:\Windows\presence.xml.

Lync 2013

For Lync 2013 we need to create the registry values in a different place. In your Registry Editor navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Policies\Microsoft\ and create a key called Office under the Microsoft key, then create a key called 15.0 under Office, and then create a key called Lync under 15.0:

Create the same values as before for EnableSIPHighSecurityMode and CustomStateURL within the Lync key:

Exit and restart your Lync client and you should see your custom statuses!

The steps above detail how to configure this for one PC, for testing purposes. Below are some resources for configuring this further for multiple PCs:

• Lync Server MVP, Jeff Schertz’ blog “Adding Custom Presence to Lync”
• TechNet “Configuring Custom Presence States”