We just launched the new Office 365 Education suite last week so you might be asking where can I learn about the new offering from an Office 365 Administrator/IT perspective or where can I find new tools to help me onboard?  We have just added some new readiness tools and training content which I have listed below:

New Office 365 service descriptions

We have just updated all the new Office 365 service descriptions which are excellent source of information for describing in great detail all of the capabilities of Office 365 Pro Plus, Lync, SharePoint, and Exchange Online services within the new Office 365 offering:

Visit it here.

New Office 365 ONRAMP tool

This is a new useful tool which walks you through a questionnaire to ensure you are familiar with all the settings, limits, etc. with Office 365 to identify possible areas to resolve prior to going to production:

It also has a new Office 365 Readiness Assessment tool to check your Active Directory, infrastructure, etc. This replaces the old readiness tool (DRT) which has been retired. This new readiness tool is available after you run through the questionnaire.

Visit the ONRAMP readiness questionnaire and readiness assessment tool here.

Grab the IDFIX tool here to help identify and remediate your local AD prior to Office 365 configuring Dirsync.

New Office 365 deployment guide

We have a new deployment guide available:

Visit here.

New Exchange 2013 Deployment Assistant

The new EDA has been updated to support Exchange 2013 Hybrid step by steps.

Visit it here.

Some awesome guided labs on the new Office 365

Some useful Office 365 Ignite training for the new Office 365 release has updated training here:

New Office 365 admin features click below:

 New Office 365 Portal click below:

New Exchange Online OWA click below:

Exchange Hybrid configuration click below:

 ADFS configuration click below:

 Dirsync configuration click below:

Useful live or prerecorded webcasts for the new Office 365 click image below:

Visit here

New Office 365 deployment center

We have a new Office 365 deployment center which can be used for rapid pilot/testing:

Visit here.

Get a trial tenant:

The best way to learn about the new Office 365 Education is to get a trial tenant here.

Pilot or trial steps here.

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!

Hot on the heels of yesterday’s top user tip about SkyDrive Pro we’re back with our fifth instalment all about multiple calendar views in OWA (Outlook Web App).

This isn’t a feature that’s new to Office 365 Education, but it’s a question I get asked about all the time so it makes for a perfect top tip!

By default in the new Office 365 Education you are presented with your own personal calendar in which you can manage your own time and control view such as day/week/month, jump forwards and backwards in time, colour-code events by category, etc. Calendars can also by synchronised with mobile devices using Exchange ActiveSync so that your calendar is available wherever you go and is always kept up to date.

What happens if you need to manage more than one calendar? Maybe you want to have a calendar for school, and a calendar for personal events. Often, there is the need to see other people’s calendars; either to check availability or to manage their time on their behalf. Something people overlook is that you can do this right from within the Outlook Web App!

By right-clicking on the “Other Calendars” section in OWA and selecting “open calendar” you can choose to add in other calendars to your view.

A new feature of Office 365 Education is the overlaying of calendars rather than a side-by-side view. Above, we can see that there are two calendars visible: one is coloured green and we can only see free/busy information, and our own personal calendar is visible in the same space.

Office 365 Education is FREE to academic institutions and you can sign up in minutes. Why not get started with a pilot in your institution today?

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

We’re over half way through our top user tips series (there are only 10, I promise!) and today we’re looking at the latest Outlook Web App (OWA) and how it works on mobile devices such as tablet PCs and smartphones.

When you’re on a traditional device OWA can be a really powerful, browser-based, tool for managing your email, contacts and calendar; however, when you switch to more mobile, smaller and touch-enabled devices having an interface that’s been built for those environments makes more sense.

OWA is sensitive to the browser it’s being viewed on, and the great news is that in the new Office 365 Education there is a version that is specifically optimised for mobile and touch! Here’s how it looks on an iPad:

As you can see, the icons are bigger, the interface focuses on the content and it’s very easy to get access to your information. Here’s how the interface looks on smartphones: