It’s turning out to be a bumper week for Office 365 Education updates. Earlier this week it was announced that SkyDrive Pro was increasing the default storage quota from 7 GB to 25 GB and starting from now Office 365 Education Exchange Online mailbox quotas are doubling to 50 GB FREE!

When will I see my mailboxes get bigger?

Stephen Brown, a product manager on the Exchange team, made the announcement yesterday on the Office 365 technology blog that the increased quota would be rolling out from yesterday through to November so keep an eye out for the bigger quota over the next few weeks and months. This is a tremendous improvement, and one that I hope will benefit students, teachers, admin folks, and researchers across education.

If you’re an IT admin there are some tips to remember to make managing large mailboxes even easier:

• Administrators can reduce mailbox quotas – 50GB is the maximum size, but this can reduced if required. To find out how to set Exchange Online mailboxes sizes and limits in the Exchange Online environment, see the Microsoft Support article.
• If you’re running Outlook 2013 on the desktop you can use the powerful features of ActiveSync to configure Outlook to only synchronise mail from within a period of time, thereby preventing huge OST files:

Great news we just announced today the new Exchange Online mailbox quotas are now 50GB in size with no price increase. You get double mailbox storage for FREE and it will also be applied to any existing mailboxes you have in production with no extra steps required!

It is starting to rollout to tenants today and will continue through November. So you now get massive mailboxes in Office 365 education which should provide plenty of mail storage for faculty, staff and students for quite a long time.

Here is a matrix with all the new storage quota details:

Please read the official blog post here for more details.

For me, Office 365 Education just keeps getting better and better. SkyDrive Pro, part of Office 365 Education Plan A2¹, is cloud storage for education, and is the place where students and teachers can store, sync, and share their files across multiple devices with ease and security. To date SkyDrive Pro has offered institutions 7GB of cloud storage per user but yesterday Mark Kashman and Tejas Mehta, senior product managers in the SharePoint team, announced that the SkyDrive pro storage increases making it even better for storing and sharing class work.

¹Plan A2 is free for students, faculty and staff and includes Exchange Online Plan 1, Lync Online Plan 2, SharePoint Online Plan 1 and the Office Web Apps. You can sign up for free online!

Each user now gets 25 GB of SkyDrive Pro storage space

Let’s look at the headlines:

• Each user now gets 25 GB of SkyDrive Pro storage space (up from 7 GB).
• You can now increase users' SkyDrive Pro storage beyond the default 25 GB-up to 50 GB and 100 GB.
• With the new Shared with Me view, you can easily find documents others have shared with you.

I think this is a great improvement for schools, colleges and universities who are using Office 365 Education as it means their students and teachers can keep more files in the cloud, accessible from everywhere, and the fact that an administrator can increase that quota up to 100GB for individuals means that even the most demanding users should still have enough storage to keep them happy for a long time.

Don’t forget that there are applications for SkyDrive Pro on a variety of platforms including Windows 8 and iOS that make it easier to access your files on the go.

Where can I find out more?

Be sure to check out the post on the Office technology blog to find out more about how you can increase storage beyond the new default 25GB, and how you can easily find documents others have shared with you!

This is a pretty common question I get with my education customers. The answer is there is not one tool that can calculate everything for your Office 365 bandwidth but there is an Exchange calculator, Lync calculator and some guidance for SharePoint bandwidth.

Exchange bandwidth calculator

This calculator is pretty extensive as it accounts for mail usage profiles, etc:

It also allows you to calculate bandwidth needed for each site depending on what client type Mac, Outlook 2010, OWA, etc.

You can visit my other post for a bit of a deeper dive into using this bandwidth calculator here.

Grab the Exchange bandwidth calculator here.

Lync 2010 and 2013 bandwidth calculator

This is a pretty awesome bandwidth calculator where you can provide site by site calculations for Lync bandwidth required.

You can specify locations, users, type of users, concurrency, etc.

Lync calculator also has nice graphics showing bandwidth requirements per location, etc.

Grab the Lync bandwidth calculator here.

SharePoint bandwidth

I haven’t found a calculator on this for SharePoint 2013 but I did find a reference matrix from SharePoint 2010 which should be enough for a baseline estimate for SharePoint Online – I did read that SharePoint 2013 bandwidth can be up to 40% more efficient than the results below so take that into account in your estimations:

:

Here is an Office 365 WAN test result on SharePoint 2013 that has great information but not customer guidance unfortunately. See here.

There are other older SharePoint calculations available for reference here.

You can also view your available network bandwidth by running the Office 365 bandwidth test tool which is available here.

The DirSync team and the FIM Sync team are pleased to announce that we have released the Release Candidate of the Windows Azure Active Directory (AAD) Connector on Connect for pre-release evaluation. This replaces the Office 365 Connector which has earlier been available only through MCS and partner engagements.

This new Connector is based on ECMA2 and is the same we use in recent releases of DirSync. It is intended to be used when DirSync is not a viable option. We still recommend to use DirSync as the primary solution to synchronize AD to AAD and use it whenever possible. For additional details, please read the documentation that comes with the Connector.

To be able to get access to the download on Connect, go to http://connect.microsoft.com/directory and join the program “Forefront Identity Manager 2010” – “FIM Synchronization Service Connectors Pre-release”. You will be automatically approved....

You can then find the download here: https://connect.microsoft.com/site433/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=50509.
Feedback on the Connector and documentation can be submitted on Connect.

We are also looking for customers who would be interested to use this Connector in a production environment in a TAP program. These customers will be able to get production support on this pre-release version of the Connector. If you have any candidates, please send an email to andreas.kjellman@microsoft.com.

On behalf of the DirSync team and the FIM Sync team,

Thanks!