Great news! We just publically announced today at Educause that Office 365 ProPlus will be offered to students at no additional charge if all your faculty and staff are already licensed for Office 2013 Professional Plus via EES/OVSES agreement or via Office 365 ProPlus subscription.

This is incredible news for students as they can now take advantage of all that Office 365 ProPlus has to offer.

I put together a quick FAQ for what this means for your education institution:

What is included with Office 365 ProPlus subscription license?

• Office 365 ProPlus for PC (Office 2013 ProPlus base applications)
• Office 365 ProPlus for Mac (Office 2011 for Mac base applications)
• Office for iPad (see here for new update 3.27.14)
    

How many machines/devices can I run this subscription on?

Each subscription license allows you to run Office on up to five machines being Mac or PC. You can also run Office for iPad on up to 5 tablets.

Is this a full version Office and available for offline use?

Yes, this is full Office on the PC, Mac, tablet, mobile platform and all are available for offline use.

What applications come with Office 365 ProPlus for PC?

Word 2013

Excel 2013

PowerPoint 2013

OneNote 2013

Access 2013

Publisher 2013

Outlook 2013

Lync 2013

InfoPath 2013

What comes with Office 365 ProPlus for Mac?

Word 2011

Excel 2011

PowerPoint 2011

Outlook 2011

What comes with Office Mobile for iPhone? (update 3.27.14 – now free)

Word Mobile

Excel Mobile

PowerPoint Mobile

OneNote and Lync Mobile available as separate download.

See here for more options.

What comes with Office Mobile for Android? (update 3.27.14 – now free)

Word Mobile

Excel Mobile

PowerPoint Mobile

OneNote and Lync Mobile available as separate download

See here for more options.

What are the PC requirements for Office 365 ProPlus?

• Windows Server 2008 R2
• Windows 7
• Windows Server 2012
• Windows 8

32-bit Office can be installed on 32-bit or 64-bit operating systems and 64-bit Office can only be installed on 64-bit operating systems.

Computer and processor
1 GHZ or faster x86 or 64-bit processor with SSE2 instruction set.

Memory

1 GB RAM (32-bit)

2 GB RAM (64-bit) recommended for graphics features, Outlook Instant Search, and certain advanced functionality.

Disk space
3 gigabytes (GB)

Monitor resolution
1024 x 768

What are the Mac requirements for Office 365 ProPlus?

• A Mac computer with an Intel processor.
• Mac OS X version 10.5.8 or later.
• 1 GB of RAM recommended.
• 2.5 GB of available hard disk space.
• HFS+ hard disk format (also known as Mac OS Extended or HFS Plus).
• DVD drive or connection to a local area network (if installing over a network).
• 1280 x 768 or higher resolution monitor

What are the iPhone requirements for Office Mobile for iPhone?

iPhone 4

iPhone 5

iPhone 5s

iPod Touch 5th generation

All devices above must be running iOS 6.1 minimum

What about Office on the iPad?

Office for iPad is now available as of 3.27.14.  See new blog post for details here.

What are the Android requirements for Office Mobile for Android?

Android OS 4.0 or greater

Android touch enabled smartphones only

Do students have to sign into Office 365 to use any of these applications with Office 365 ProPlus?

Yes, a valid Office 365 ProPlus license tied to a valid Office 365 login for students is required to enable any of the four Office 365 ProPlus features.

How long can a student leverage Office 365 ProPlus?

The guidelines are they can leverage this until they graduate or are no longer attending your school. At that point, you must disable their Office 365 ProPlus license.

How is this different from Office 2013 Professional Plus?

The Office 2013 applications are exactly the same however there are some differences including patching, license sign in for usage, and Click-to-run (C2R) technology for rapid installs (2 minutes for quick usage).

Can I run a local image of Office 365 ProPlus to install from and can I customize the install share?

Yes, you can install Office 365 ProPlus for PC from a local share and still leverage C2R technology for a few minutes installation of Office and with the Office Deployment Tool you can also customize the Office installation. See here for more instructions

Where can I get training on Office 365 ProPlus?

There is some excellent end user training on Office 2013 here.

There is some excellent end user training on Office for Mac 2011 here:

• Excel 2011
• Outlook 2011

• PowerPoint 2011
• Word 2011

Some end user help guides on Office Mobile for iPhone here and here.

Some end user help guides on Office Mobile for Android here and here.

Some end user Office for iPad training here:

• Excel for iPad training
• PowerPoint for iPad training
• Word for iPad training

Is there a deployment guide for Office 365 ProPlus?

Yes, there is an excellent IT Pro reference guide here and see my deployment blog post here.

When can I obtain this license for my students?

You can order it through your reseller. Please see these three part series on “How to get Student Advantage” - partI, partII, and partIII for guidance. Here is a new “Student Advantage Deployment Guide”.

Here is a common archiving/eDiscovery/compliance FAQ I put together based on several education customer discussions:

If I currently have a 3rd party on-premises archiving solution does Exchange in-place archiving in Office 365 do the same thing?

No, it is not an exact match of functionality since we have more granular capabilities in Exchange Online where we break out archival of email (Exchange In-Place Archiving) from the preservation of email (Exchange In-Place Hold).

As you can imagine because we are more granular in capabilities, this is the an area which leads to quite a bit of confusion for everyone since there are multiple definitions of Exchange “archiving”. These two capabilities can be complementary or separate if need be where in a lot of on premises Exchange archiving solutions they are one in the same.

Exchange Online’s In-Place archiving is separate ‘mailbox’ for storing older email to be archived. The best analogy about Exchange In-Place Archiving is this is a server side/cloud based PST. You can delete mail from your PST on premises and the same is true for Exchange in-place archiving. 

In-Place Archive mailbox end user OWA view

If the your goal is to achieve PRESERVATION of email (e.g. 3 year retention) which is what 99.9% of customers are looking for when replacing their older 3rd party Exchange archiving solution than the only way to accomplish this is with Exchange In Place Hold. This will preserve content in both primary mailbox and in-place Archive mailbox as well as Lync conversations.

Determining if a mailbox has an Exchange In-Place Hold. PowerShell can also be used for bulk enablement.

What is the difference between ‘Litigation Hold’ and ‘Exchange In-place Hold’?

This is another area that has created confusion for several customers.  Exchange Litigation Hold is legacy functionality from Exchange 2010 and Exchange In-Place Hold is new functionality from Exchange 2013 or the new Exchange Online.

The recommendation is the leverage Exchange In-place hold over Litigation Hold as it provides more granular functionality such as time based holds, etc. It is also a good idea to mention you want to enable ‘In-place hold’ over ‘litigation hold’ to avoid enabling legacy features by accident.

Litigation hold remains only to support migration from 2010 litigation hold mailboxes to the new Exchange Online.  See differences here under ‘In-Place Hold and Litigation Hold’.

What components do I get with add-on Exchange Online Archiving SKU with Office 365?

You get two features with the EOA add-on SKU for Office 365:

• Exchange In-Place Hold  - see here fore more info
• Unlimited Exchange In-Place Archiving – see here for more info

You can also get this functionality with the Exchange Plan 2 license as well as the A3 license.  See here and here for more info on licensing options.

Are my Exchange Online unlimited in-place archives tamper proof and preserved by default?

Not by default. Unlimited Exchange In-place Archives mean the archive mailbox is unlimited in size (100 GB default but can be increased to a larger size via escalation) and unlimited in retention duration.  If a retention policy is created to archive mail every 180 days, for example, mail is moved from the primary mailbox to the archive mailbox however it is NOT preserved and mail can be altered in those archives.  Any mail in the in place archive can be found using in place eDiscovery and also can be found in the Outlook 2010+ or OWA browser as well. This allows for easy discoverability and clean end user access to their archived email.

To preserve and prevent tampering of these In-place Archives in the In-Place Archive mailbox or mail which is in the primary mailbox, you must enable Exchange In-Place hold on the mailboxes in question.  This will log any alterations and preserve any emails deleted from the primary or archive mailbox.

How many eDiscovery types are in Office 365?  What licenses do I need for it or them?

Two types.  Exchange In-Place eDiscovery using Exchange Administration Console and eDiscovery Center as part of SharePoint Online.  Exchange in place eDiscovery is included with the A2 license for both admin console and for searches and SharePoint eDiscovery Center requires A3 license for both admin queries and for the users which are searched.

Exchange In-Place eDiscovery console  more on this here

SharePoint eDiscovery Center – more on this here

Are there any limits on eDiscovery search size in Exchange Online?  If yes, how do you get around it?

Yes, Exchange in-place eDiscovery is capped at 5,000 mailboxes for search size using the EAC GUI. We designed this to be for smaller searches on average we found most customers search no more than 20 mailboxes at a time.  If a customer wants more than 5000 they must use PowerShell to query larger mailbox sets. See here for search-mailbox options.

SharePoint eDiscovery search also has limits of 100 SharePoint sources, 1500 exchange sources, and 500 keywords.

What are the four “in-place” compliance/retention features in Office 365? What licenses do I need for each?  What does each one do?

I put together a matrix to help with this:

Where can I learn more details on these topics discussed above?

This is a great starting site here. It has very useful videos walking through the Exchange In-Place components discussed above.

See here and here for more details on archiving and retention.

More on SharePoint In-Place Hold and eDiscovery see here.

Best reference I have seen for limits and licensing on eDiscovery is here.

With a little under a month until Student Advantage becomes available (that's December 1st, put it in the diary!) one of the questions I am getting asked most frequently is: how do I get Student Advantage in Office 365 Education?

I’m going to cover this off in two posts, this first one to discuss how to get Student Advantage added to your existing Office 365 Education tenant. The second post will be a student-view; how to access and download the software.

Part One: How institutions get Student Advantage

Let’s start with a recap of how you qualify. Any institution will need to meet some criteria:

1. You must have an OVS-ES or EES volume licensing agreement.
2. You must cover 100% of your faculty/staff for Office on that OVS/ES or EES agreement.

As long as you meet the criteria you’ll need to contact your licensing reseller after December 1st to order the Student Advantage licences. What happens next depends on which volume licence agreement you have.

OVS-ES Customers

Once you’ve placed your order with your reseller you’ll get sent a link to retrieve your keys from the Volume Licensing Service Centre (VLSC). Through here you’ll see your product keys and be able to access the redemption interface to enter your keys into your tenant.

After you’ve entered the keys you’ll have the licences available (note, the image below does not show the Student Advantage Office 365 ProPlus licences, it’s just for illustration):

You can then follow the process for assigning these licences to your student users in the normal way; either via the admin centre, or Windows Remote PowerShell. These will be in addition to any other Office 365 licences a user may already have, such as Exchange Online Plan 1 or Office 365 Plan A2.

EES Customers

As with OVS-ES you’ll need to contact your reseller to order the licences. Once the order is processed an email will be sent to the Online Services Manager, Notices Contact, or the Primary Contact. This email will contain two links: one to sign in, and one to sign up.

Whoever is going to process this email needs to ensure they are fully signed out of any and all Microsoft Online Services (this includes Outlook.com, SkyDrive, Xbox Live, Office 365, etc.). This will avoid accidentally attempting to associate the licences to the wrong place. Given that you’ll already have a tenant with users in place you’ll need to click sign in and authenticate with your Office 365 administrative credentials.

This process provisions the licences to your tenant, and once completed you’ll be able to assign them to your users following whatever process you currently use.

Check back soon for part two where I’ll cover how a student accesses their software once you’ve allocated their licence.

This is a common question I get from customers deploying Office 365 Education. There are several training resources available for end user’s to learn Office 365 Education.

This site has excellent Office 365 end user video and text training resources here:

The videos are on Office 365 common usage scenarios:

A downloadable Office 365 video training series called ‘Get to know Office 365’ you can host in your internal training sites here:

Some SharePoint Online quickstart handouts here:

Sample downloadable SharePoint .doc training:

If you don’t have Microsoft IT Academy you really should get it for your academic institution since you can get access to Microsoft training courses and digital MS Press books.  This is an affordable training option for your end users where you can obtain a site license for your entire academic institution (contact your Microsoft account manager or Microsoft rep to sign up) to allow them to learn Microsoft technologies:

You can assign Office 365 specific/customized learning curriculums to your end users and you can track their progress and completion of content. You can also add other Microsoft products to their training plan such as Outlook, Lync, SharePoint, Office, etc.:

Sample of an Office 365 customized CBT curriculum you can assign custom courses to an end user or IT pro/admin:

View of the course outline for Communicating and Collaborating with Office 365:

Office 365 ProPlus/Student Advantage training would be here:

As part of our ongoing commitment to education, we are thrilled to announce Student Advantage, a new benefit to qualifying institutions which will make it easy for students to use the latest and best version of full Office at their education institution and at home. 

Student Advantage - Office 365 ProPlus

So what does this mean? From 1st December, 2013, any institutions worldwide that licenses Office for staff and faculty can provide access to Office 365 ProPlus for students at no additional cost. As a result, more than 35,000 institutions worldwide are automatically eligible to deliver the Student Advantage benefit to their students. 

Office 365 ProPlus includes all the familiar and full Office applications, such as Word, Excel and PowerPoint, and offers the ability for these to be locally installed on up to five devices and available offline.

Furthermore, when a school combines Student Advantage with our other cloud services - Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online - of which all are available free through Office 365 Education, students have access to the same set of productivity tools and services used by Fortune 500 companies all over the world.

“Students use Office every day for school work and activities that are most important to them. Office not only helps students stay organised and get their work done today, but at the same time develops skills that will be required when they enter the workforce,”  said Antony Salcito, vice president of Worldwide Public Sector Education at Microsoft. “We are thrilled to offer Student Advantage to schools across the globe so students have access to the latest, most up-to-date version of the world’s leading set of productivity tools in order to give them a competitive advantage when entering the workforce.”

To help you learn more about this benefit to your students, we are going to be running a number of Q&A sessions via Yammer and Twitter over the next week. More details to follow via the blog and our Facebook and Twitter accounts.

In the meantime, if you have any immediate questions or queries, drop us a note in the comments below.

¹ Windows PC client programs and/or features only. Cannot be used across devices.