On July 10th at our UK HQ in Thames Valley Park, Reading, Berks, we’ll be holding an event in conjunction with the University of West London to bring all interested parties together to showcase and discuss Office 365 Education, and how by harnessing its power institutions can provide a better social learning environment.

In the summer of 2012 The University of West London set out to harness the immense potential of the free cloud-based suite of collaboration tools, provided by Office 365 Education, to create a personalised, interactive, social platform to support the institution’s mission to raise aspiration through the pursuit of excellence. Allowing students to combine social learning with academic study.  The University won the UCISA Award for Excellence, 2012 for the service they have created.

This event will provide detail on what UWL wanted to achieve, how they accomplished it and a demonstration of capability and features. In addition Microsoft will share latest features of Office 365 Education.

9:30am –             Arrive and refreshments

9:50am –             Welcome to Microsoft

10:00am –           Introduction by VC of UWL

10:15am –           Office 365 latest information– Microsoft

10:45am –           UWL – Highway to Heaven– Adrian Ellison CIO UWL

11:30am –           Break

11:45am -            UWL – Presentation/Demonstration of environment

12:45pm –           Lunch and networking

1:45pm –             Fulcrum – Developing the portal (partner who worked with UWL)

2:30pm-               Open Questions on UWL environment and Office 365

2:45pm-               Break

3:00pm-               Janet Amendments for Office 365 and Janet/Microsoft Alliance Agreement

3:20pm –             Office 365 user group – introduction – Group discussion                          

3:45pm-               Close

Places for this event are very limited to register today using invite code 7EA736 to avoid disappointment!

When Office 365 Education was launched, and the ability to provide seamless single sign-on to the service was realised, a lot of my customers were emailing asking me how they could have all the benefits of ADFS without the infrastructure burden. After all, many education customers, particularly schools, do not have the funds to invest in on-premises hardware and have to be as efficient as they can with what they already have.

The truth is that in order to provide a highly available, properly sized, secure ADFS infrastructure some customers would have to deploy extra servers, and surely part of anybody’s cloud strategy is to reduce on-premises hardware not add to it! That’s where the Office 365 Adapter can help – by utilising the power of Windows Azure.

With the introduction of Windows Azure Virtual Machines, institutions who require Active Directory federation have another Microsoft-supported choice for hosting these services.

Aside from the obvious benefit of moving to Windows Azure being reduced on-premises hardware, there are many other ways it can be an advantage:

• Continuity - your students and staff can continue to sign in to Office 365 Education from outside school, even if your school broadband link goes down.
• Flexibility – components can be relocated, load-balanced and distribute across the world.
• Resilience and disaster recovery – Windows Azure can host redundant critical services, enabling failover in case of an on-premises disaster.

Download the Office 365 Adapter guide today to see how it all works!

Of course, even the Office 365 Adapter requires some time and effort to set up and configure. With the IT manager’s time already divided too many different ways, it might be nice to pay somebody else to sort SSO out for you. Helpfully, there are partners like IAM Cloud who offer similar cloud-hosted solutions to provide ADFS without the on-premises infrastructure to go with it!

Don't forget to check out the new password synchronisation options there are, too! When ADFS is just out of reach, DirSync & Password Sync can keep your student and staff identities the same between Active Directory and Office 365, without the single sign-on capabilities.

I have several customers in education getting upgraded to the Office 365 Service Upgrade for 2013. Most have migrated smoothly but a few customers have seen some issues after upgrade so I decided to post some guidance/FAQ to help make it a better upgrade experience.

What does the Office 365 Service Upgrade for 2013 upgrade mean?

If you have been on Office 365 Education prior to February 27th 2013 this means you are you are on previous technology of cloud services (2010 technologies). We shipped a new Office 365 Education offering in February based on the 2013 technologies. We have been upgrading 2010 (wave14) customers to 2013 (wave15).

Where can I read more information on what new capabilities are in the Office 365 Service Upgrade for 2013?

Exchange Online here

Lync Online here

SharePoint Online here

Office 365 Pro Plus here

I also recommend you read and understand the new Office 365 service descriptions here as this is like the detailed functional specification of each service.

Is there end user or power user training available on these new capabilities?

Yes, it is available here.

Is there administrator training or guides on this new 2013 tenant?

Yes, great information available here and on my other blog post here.

Do I need to change anything on my side prior to this upgrade?

Potentially yes if you are not current on the latest service packs and cumulative patches for Office, XP or Exchange. This 2013 Service Upgrade has newer patch requirements that were not required in the 2010 version.

I have had customers experience Outlook client connectivity issues if they are not patched on the client or on the hybrid server for example. Please read here on the latest requirements for this upgrade. I strongly urge you to follow these requirements closely and not skip this step to keep your upgrade clean.

The other high priority item to remediate/evaluate prior to the 2013 upgrade is you also need to check your DNS, Outlook, and Autodiscover settings prior to the upgrade. Several other Outlook client connectivity issues may occur if you any of these are misconfigured prior to upgrade. See here.

Is there a 2013 upgrade step by step guide I can follow?

Yes, there a very useful Office 365 Service Upgrade 2013 guide here which I strongly recommend you follow closely to avoid issues.

How long does it take for me to get upgraded?

On average each tenant upgrades takes about 48 hours to complete. No loss of email connectivity or productivity will occur during this time. The end user will be asked to restart Outlook and assuming you followed the patching and configuration steps above there should be no further client touch required. SharePoint and Lync will not be interrupted either.

What do I have to do post upgrade?

You have still migrate all of your SharePoint 2010 site collections to SharePoint 2013 including your ‘My Site’ site collection to enable SkyDrive Pro for your end users. See here for site collection upgrade steps.

Do I need to install new clients?

No, there are no client upgrades are required. You can continue to use Outlook 2007, Office 2010, and Lync 2010 against the new 2013 upgrade provided you have patched them appropriately in the link provided above.

For more information on the upgrade please visit the Office 365 Service Upgrade Center for Enterprise here.

Office Mobile for iPhone

Today June 14 2013 Microsoft is releasing Office Mobile for iPhone in the US market and available in the Apple App Store at no additional charge for Office 365 subscribers. Starting June 18, Office Mobile for iPhone will become available in 135 international markets in 29 languages. Office Mobile for iPhone is free of charge for Office 365 subscribers, and provides a great mobile viewing and editing experience across Word, PowerPoint and Excel.  To utilize Office Mobile for iPhone it requires the user to have Office 365 Pro subscription with the A3 SKU plan (or E3 for commercial customers) as well as an Office365 SIGN IN account. Screenshots noted at Office blog HERE

Similar to Office Mobile on Windows Phone, Office Mobile for iPhone offers great Office content viewing and on-the-go content editing capabilities for Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents. Compatible  with iPhone 4, 4S and 5, iPod Touch 5th Generation running iOS 6.1 or later.

Some of the key benefits:

• ·         Consistent Office Experience. Your formatting and documents remain intact when viewing, editing, or adding comments, thanks to support for charts, animations, SmartArt graphics, and shapes.  And when you return to your PC or Mac, your document looks like it should.
• ·         Easy Access. We made it easy access your Office content in the cloud on SkyDrive or SkyDrive Pro.  Also, because Office Mobile is connected to your Office 365 subscription, you’ll see the content you recently viewed on your computer in the Recent Documents panel on your phone. And, of course, you can view and edit Office documents sent in email.
• ·         Optimized for What You Want to Do on a Small Screen. An example, the Slide Navigator allows you to page through PowerPoint presentations fast, while Speaker Notes help you practice presentations on the go. And, when moving Word documents from your PC to your phone, the Resume Reading feature takes you to the exact point in the document where you last left off, so you never miss a beat. 
• ·         Sharing Built-in. You can make quick edits and share your documents, right from your phone with Office Mobile. When working with others, you can review comments in Word and Excel documents on your phone and add your own. When you’re done, you can share your files with others on SkyDrive or SkyDrive Pro or just send your document as an email attachment.
• ·         View & Edit: Office Mobile for iPhone allows you to access, view, and edit Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents on the go from your smartphone. You can also create new Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.
• ·         Formatting: Document elements and formatting remain intact when viewing, editing, or adding comments, thanks to support for charts, animations, SmartArt graphics, and shapes.

How do I get Office Mobile for iPhone?

Office 365 subscribers can download the application in 2 ways:

1.       Go directly to the Apple App Store and search for Microsoft Office Mobile, and then download it. 

2.       Or go to your Office account page, select their type of phone, operator, and mobile number and we’ll send a text message to their phone with a link to Office Mobile in the app store.

What about the iPad or Android?

• ·         We built Office Mobile for iPhone to ensure a great Office experience when using a small screen device, similar to Office Mobile on Window Phone.  If you have an iPad, we recommend using the Office Web Apps which provide the best Office experience on a tablet.  We have made lots of enhancements to Office Web Apps including a touch experience for tablet users.
• ·         Office also provides additional iOS and Android capabilities for the things people want to do most on their mobile devices – email, real-time communications and note-taking. We provide native apps for OneNote, Lync and SharePoint, in addition to supporting Exchange Active Sync for email, calendar and contacts.

Enjoy!!

I have some exciting news!

One of the most popular features of Live@edu, from a “techy” perspective, was the ability to synchronise the passwords from your local AD user accounts into the cloud using the Password Change Notification Service (PCNS). This was a great way to provide a consistent sign-in experience to users since their password would always be the same in both their AD account and their email account – simple!

In Office 365 we introduced the ability to have federated authentication using ADFS – this gave institutions a more flexible solution for managing authentication for their users, and allowed a true single sign-on implementation for users. One username, one password.

Of course, as awesome as ADFS is to have, it does sometimes require institutions to deploy extra hardware, and that can mean extra cost. At a time when schools, colleges and universities across the UK are being driven hard to reduce costs and be more efficient with their spending it can often be a challenge to make a highly available and robust ADFS infrastructure a reality.

Connect Windows Server AD to Windows Azure AD

Yesterday Alex Simmons, director of program management, posted up on the Active Directory Team Blog:

I'm happy to let you know that as of last Friday (5/31) we've made it dead simple to connect AD to Azure AD, enabling users to log into Office 365, Windows Azure and any other cloud app integrated with Windows Azure AD using their on-premise username and password.  We've done this by updating Windows Azure Active Directory Sync Agent (a.k.a. DirSync) adding the ability to sync hashes of users' on-premise AD passwords into Windows Azure AD. 

Tool available now!

You can download the new version of DirSync from TechNet or via the Office 365 portal today. My colleague Mark Garcia, over on the US education cloud blog, has posted up a great FAQ all about the new version with a screenshot guide of how to replace your existing DirSync version with the new one!