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!!

“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

PowerShell is cool – at least I think it is! We’ve been talking about using PowerShell to manage Live@edu since the early days of Exchange Labs, and several times since.

As more and more customers complete the upgrade from Live@edu to Office 365 for education I thought it would be a good time to talk about managing Office 365 for education with PowerShell.

Install the Office 365 cmdlets

To begin using the Office 365 cmdlets, you first need to install them. The requirements for installing the Office 365 cmdlets are as follows:

• You can install the cmdlets on a Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 computer.
• You must have Windows PowerShell and the .NET Framework 3.5.1 enabled.
• You must install the Microsoft Online Services Sign-in Assistant. Download and install one of the following from the Microsoft Download Center:
  • Microsoft Online Services Sign-In Assistant (IDCRL7) - 32 bit version
  • Microsoft Online Services Sign-In Assistant (IDCRL7) - 64 bit version

To install the cmdlets, perform the following steps:

1. Download one of the following from the Microsoft Download Center:

   • Microsoft Online Services Module for Windows PowerShell (32-bit version)
   • Microsoft Online Services Module for Windows PowerShell (64-bit version)

2. To install the cmdlets, double-click the AdministrationConfig.msi file.

   The installer adds the program to your Start menu and a shortcut to your desktop.

Connect Windows PowerShell to the service

Click the Microsoft Online Services Module shortcut to open a Windows PowerShell workspace that has the cmdlets. Alternatively, you can load the Office 365 cmdlets manually by typing import-module MSOnline at the Windows PowerShell command prompt.

For more information about cmdlets, you can do the following:

• Get a list of cmdlets by typing the following at the command prompt: get-command -module MSOnline
• View the Help file for a cmdlet by typing the following at the command prompt:get-help <cmdlet-name> -detailed

More Info

• Use Windows PowerShell to manage Office 365
• Windows PowerShell cmdlets for Office 365
• Reference to Available PowerShell cmdlets in Exchange Online
• Use Windows PowerShell to manage Exchange Online

Hi folks,

We have a lot of customers out there in edu-land that are subscribers to not only Office 365 for education, but also IT Academy – our extensive and comprehensive education program.  ITA offers the latest Microsoft software for labs, classrooms, and PCs used by students, access to a wide range of Microsoft E-Learning courses and the Instructor Learning Management System (LMS) to help track and monitor student progress, discounts on official courseware that is available to academic institutions only, e-Reference Libraries that offer instant access to over 127 Microsoft Press books online, TechNet subscriptions and marketing tools to promote the association with the Microsoft brand and official certifications.  That’s a LOT of stuff!

We have always offered the ability to logon with a Microsoft Account (formally LiveID) and now, we also support using your AzureAD account, which ships with and is the under-lying identity provider for Office 365.

When you go to sign into ITA, this is what you will see – note the 2 options.

Click the “Office 365 account” button and you will be prompted to sign in with your credentials.  If this is the first time you log in, you will also be asked to enter the ITA subscription code for your institution.  Then, you are good to go.  Also, if your institution happens to be federating with the Azure AD service, the federating credentials can be used.

If you are an ISV and want to use Azure AD with your app in the same way we have with Office 365, you can read all about it here.

Enjoy!

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”