Next up in our partner blog post series is some great information from long-time partner Dell.  A lot of customers ask us how they can migrate their email into Exchange Online from other services – well read on to find out more :)

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Office 365 is an exciting topic for anyone planning on saving money by moving their messaging service to the cloud. Many customers are quick to arrive at the idea that it will save them money in the long run but usually struggle with a good cost effective way to move mailbox users while retaining their important data. OnDemand Migration for Email from Dell offers a solution that makes the process easy that requires no on-premise software installation.

Dell has over 12 years of experience migrating users and email data to the latest and greatest version of Exchange. We have migrated over 30 million mailboxes to new versions of Exchange, so naturally, helping our customers get to Office 365 was an easy decision for us. Microsoft’s Office 365 platform offers customers more flexibility in pricing, ease of support, and reduced infrastructure costs all the while providing users the same great Exchange email experience they had on-premise. Our customers approached us early on with interest in migrating to this latest platform knowing from past experience that we could take them there with minimal impact to their users and infrastructure.

Dell’s OnDemand Migration for Email is a solution that migrates mailboxes to Office 365 in a fast and secure way. It will migrate mailbox data from Exchange 2000/2003/2007/2010/2013, Google’s Gmail, GroupWise, SunOne, and Notes (coming soon!). The solution provides a high degree of visibility into the process in order to monitor status and troubleshoot issues should they occur.

OnDemand Migration for Email runs in the cloud as well. It’s built on Microsoft’s Windows Azure platform. Choosing to deploy our solution on this platform was also an easy decision. Microsoft provides a reliable robust system for application deployment where our customers can gain the ease of accessibility and greater performance in Azure than they could if the application was limited to their on-premise datacenter.

Take a look at the video to see OnDemand Migration for email in action from Ron Robbins at Dell.

OnDemand Migration for Email offers customers a fast, easy, and secure way to migrate user mailboxes to Office 365. It requires no installation, can run in a web browser, and can be accessed from anywhere. Dell makes it easy and affordable to make the move to Office 365.

Dell and Microsoft are partnered to help you affordably adopt Microsoft Office 365 as your new messaging platform and are offering preferred pricing to our education customers that contact us. Visit http://www.quest.com/education-migration to learn more about this program. Use the links on that page to find out more about our solutions for Office 365 and contact us to qualify for your preferred pricing.

Choose a solution from a partner with unmatched experience and make your migration a successful one!

If you are looking to take your Lync web conferencing to the next level you have to check out EventBuilder's new L+ offering.

Simply put it enhances Lync to provide more functionality for online learning such as: advanced Registration, Archiving (online storage), Streaming and allow for much larger groups to attend a web conference- like TENS of Thousands!  L+ works with Lync Online or Lync on premises.  Lync Online Plan 2 provides FREE Web Conferencing  in the Office 365 for Education Plan A2 noted HERE.  Free Lync Online web conferencing combined with EventBuilder's  L+ is an incredible Event & Web Conferencing platform Educators really should consider!

Aligning to the proliferation of MOOCs – L+ is a great platform for simplifying and streamlining the delivery of content to thousands of people at one time and advanced recording.  The presenter can use their Lync interface for all the presentation and authoring work and can present to student audiences of any size and just about any device- PC, Mac, various Browsers. Once recorded the MOOC can be scheduled for re-broadcast at any time.

Simplified Recording with L+ combines recording and publishing. With other recording methods you just get the .wmv file but then what? With L+ you get a web url complete with registration, graphics, etc to distribute instantly (and you can download the .wmv)

Robust, professional cloud-based application that allows Lync users to deliver high-value, sophisticated online events and training programs to audiences of any size. Manage the entire event lifecycle from start to finish, without the need for any additional hardware or software.  L+ is licensed by the organizer/presenter to make compliance a breeze.

EventBuilder has been a Microsoft partner for 10 years, and a long time Live meeting reseller -services provider but recently transitioned their platform onto Azure and  enabling Live Meeting customers to fully transition to Lync through their Live Meeting to Lync Program.  

Today their development team is integrating audio conferencing bridges to the Lync session providing moderated audio conferencing allowing presenters to stay in their native Lync.   Check out the latest video snack showing how it works: EventBuilder Lync Enhancement Video

If interested in receiving more information contact them at:  sales@eventbuilder.com

The third partner guest blog post series is from a UK ISV that has a Microsoft SharePoint MVP at the helm, Alex Pearce.  I had the pleasure of presenting with Alex at our recent Microsoft Global Education Partner Summit.  Alex, over to you:

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BFC Networks is a UK-based company who provides customisation for Office 365 for education.  Their SharePoint customisations are currently being used by 1 million users across the UK.  We are now geared up for SharePoint 2013 with our Learning Platform Lite for schools, groups of schools and councils/districts.

Making the SharePoint interface more relevant to the student user:
Out of the box, the SharePoint can appear generic to the learner, so we have implemented a set of attractive design options that can be changed by the school to use their own colours or to present something that is relevant to that school day such as a sporting event or the weather outside; it rains here a lot in the UK :)

Please check out my demo to see what we can deliver to customers.

I hope you enjoyed that, and can see how we can help to make SharePoint Online the most relevant collaboration platform in the classroom, with our customisations.  BFC Networks is always on the cutting edge of technology and always looking at how other industry wide products can be used with Microsoft solutions such as Moodle and mobile devices. You will soon see new and exciting products coming out that will allow you to connect to SharePoint and only be 1 click or one figure swipe away from getting the information you require.

For more information and to request a demo, navigate to www.bfcnetworks.com and get in touch.

Alex

Check out this video explaining the two accounts users will have after their institution upgrades from Live@edu to Office 365 Education.

The upgrade process from Live@edu to Office 365 Education has begun, and if your organisation has an IT Academy subscription then you have access to the Office 365 training material and the ability to gain a Microsoft certification!

Through using the IT Academy, your institution’s IT staff can be completely proficient in Office 365; meaning they can deploy faster and reduce any issues that may arise when migrating users to the new environment. From a Network Manager’s point of view training is offered at academic prices, suggesting the woes of a training budget are minimised.

This means that you can use IT Academy to support your institution’s adoption and implementation of Office 365; permitting the full promotion of features and benefits to all staff and students, allowing learning objectives to be enhanced.

For instance, you have all of these resources available with the IT Academy on Office 365:

To learn more about IT Academy Certifications and indeed how the MOS 365 Certifications can help with your Office 365 Education deployment and training please email educationuk@microsoft.com to register for our FREE Certification Roadmap Webinar Tuesday 19^th March 12-1pm.