This is becoming a popular question in education now that Student Advantage is coming very soon.  I put together a quick FAQ to answer some of these common questions.

What is Office 365 ProPlus Click-to-Run and how does it differ from MSI/ISO installations?

There are several differences including:

• License assigned to a person not a computer – can run on up to 5 machines
• User must authenticate (Sign-in) to Office using Office 365 valid credentials (e.g. Dirsynced creds from on prem AD or Office 365 only Ids) – once per device
• Streams down Office payload and you can use Office quickly before entire payload is streamed
• No KMS or MAK concept required
• Office Telemetry
• Slipstreamed updates/patches

What happens when I try to install Office 365 ProPlus on a 6th device?

It will prompt you to deactivate on a previous device.

Do my Office 365 ProPlus users always have to be internet connected to leverage this?

No, we do not require a machine to be always internet connected to leverage Office 365 ProPlus.  However, we do check for valid Office 365 ProPlus subscription every 30 days. After 30+ or more days in no verification of a valid license Office 365 ProPlus will go into reduced functionality mode which means view and print only are available. See here for more information.

Can I run older versions of Office side by side if I have an application that requires older versions of Office?

Yes, Click-to-Run uses application virtualization which allows you to run older versions of Office in parallel. Previous versions required a de-installation of older versions of Office. This provides you a comfort level that you can always fall back for worst case incompatibilities.

Can I use ADFS or Dirsync with Password sync credentials to login into my Office 365 ProPlus installation?

Yes, this is valid. The key is the identity you log in with must be tied to an Office 365 ProPlus license within Office 365.

Are my user required to be local administrators to install from the cloud portal or on prem using Click-to-Run?

Yes, Click-to-Run from either the Office 365 Portal (above) or a local installation require the local administrator right to install.

Can I deploy Office 365 ProPlus from an on prem source?

Yes, you can download an Office 365 ProPlus package for customization and local installation.

How do I grab an Office 365 ProPlus image for local customization and deployment?

Run the Office Deploment Tool (ODT) here.

Use setup to grab the Click-to-Run package from Office 365 (e.g. setup.exe /download http://sourcebitsurl/download.xml)

Use the Office Deployment Tool to customize the configuration XML

Add C2R packages to your software distribution infrastructure

Deploy C2R packages (e.g. setup.exe /configure \\server\sourcepath\install.xml)

Layer on add-ins or customizations via Group Policy

More information on ODT for Click-to-Run here.

Which one should I use the Office 365 portal or on prem source?

This all depends on what your end goals are. Do you require customization? Do you want to maintain Office 365 ProPlus packages locally? Do you want to control installations/bandwidth? See here for more information on this.

How do I customize settings with an Office 365 ProPlus package?

Two different components needed:

1) Group Policy templates are used for changing specific settings in Office 365 ProPlus.

2) Configuration.xml file is used for specifying installation and update options in the package.

Where can I grab the Group Policy templates for my Click-to-Run installation?

You can grab the ADMX, ADM Group Policy Admin template and the Office Customization Tool (OPAX/OPAL) files here and you can view all the customization settings available to you here.

What can the Configuration.XML file do?

It is used for specifying the installation and update options of your Office 365 ProPlus package.

Here is what it can do:

• Add or remove products from the installation

• Add or remove languages from the installation

• Specify display options

• Set logging options

• Specify software updates behavior for Click-to-Run

See here for more details on the configuration.xml file.

Can I use System Center Configuration Manager 2012 or Windows Intune to deploy Office 365 ProPlus?

Yes, you can push an Office 365 ProPlus package using either technologies to deploy to user workstations. With Windows Intune you can even source the Office 365 bits from Office 365 portal rather than locally.

For more on Configuration Manager see here or Intune see here.

What about when updates, patches and service packs come out? How do they work now with Office 365 ProPlus?

This is drastically different with Office 365 ProPlus. We now rebuild and slipstream the source file location Office 365 ProPlus every second Tuesday of the month. This way every net new patches, update is slipstreamed into the latest build.

For existing Office 365 ProPlus installations, via the self-healing mechanism, they will also autoupdate the patches down to their local installations of Office 365 ProPlus. They download only the deltas each month not a full re-install.

Users are not impacted if they are using Office while a patch is streamed down. When the user closes and re-opens the Office application the automatically are using the newer build.

This gets IT out of the patching business and they can also download the latest slipstreamed Office build every month for on prem deployments of Office 365 ProPlus.

Can put an Office 365 ProPlus package onto student lab workstations?

Yes, you can either stream it down upon login or push it to the workstation using App-V, Configuration Manager, etc. One key requirement is you must log into Office first with a valid user license. ADFS SSO in this lab scenario would automatically log them into Office 365 ProPlus assuming they are domain joined lab machines and the student is logging into the workstation with an identity that has an associated Office 365 ProPlus license.

What about using Office 365 ProPlus and desktop virtualization (VDI, RDS, TS)?

I will post a separate post on this soon. There are several intricacies involved with this but user dedicated desktop VDI is supported.  You can read here on this topic.

Where can I find some IT training on Office 365 Pro Plus?

Some excellent training for IT pros just became available:

See here.

In part one of this little trio I talked about how institutions who already have Office 365 Education can get access to Student Advantage, and in part two I looked at how students access the benefit. In this final part I’ll look at what you need to do to if you don’t already have Office 365 Education.

How do I get Student Advantage in Office 365 Education?

Office 365 ProPlus, which is the “proper name” for Student Advantage, is delivered through Office 365 Education. You might jump to the conclusion that in order to get it you must be using Office 365 Education for all of the other workloads that come with it, like Exchange Online, Lync Online or SharePoint Online. You’d be wrong.

Office 365 Education is a collection of many services:

• Windows Azure Active Directory for identity
• Exchange Online for email, calendaring, etc.
• Lync Online for instant messaging, voice and video communication, etc.
• SharePoint Online, SkyDrive Pro and Office Web Apps for document creation, storage and collaboration, etc.
• Office 365 ProPlus for the full featured rich client experience of Office on the desktop and mobile devices.

The only required part of Office 365 Education is Windows Azure AD – that’s the bit that controls the user accounts and licensing. Without it, there’d be no service. Everything else is optional. You can pick and choose which services you take; many start with Exchange Online, adding in other services later. Some will start with just Office 365 ProPlus (under Student Advantage).

You don’t have to move away from your current email and collaboration services to pass on the Student Advantage benefit to your students! Although obviously, I think you should because the full Office 365 Education collection of services when run together is pretty awesome.

How to get started as quickly as possible: FastTrack

Now that we’ve cleared up the misunderstanding about how Student Advantage is delivered we can look at the quickest route to getting all signed up and ready to go.

As well as the resources I’ve put together on this blog, there’s a very handy portal called FastTrack that takes the behemoth that is all of Office 365 Education and distils signing up to it into 3 simple steps: pilot, deploy and enhance.

In a nutshell, using FastTrack as a guide, you need to go through a few easy stages:

1. Sign up.
2. Verify academic eligibility by adding your domain to the tenant.
3. Create your user accounts either through a CSV file upload, or creating automatically from your local AD.
4. Follow the steps in part one of this blog trio.
5. Follow the steps in part two!

Beyond Student Advantage

It goes without saying that once your students are using Office 365 ProPlus they’ll get even more value from it by pairing it with SkyDrive Pro and SharePoint Online, Lync Online and Exchange Online. Getting started with FastTrack for the purposes of getting Office 365 ProPlus is a great way to dip your toe into the water but consider piloting the other services and maybe working with a partner to roll them out over time.

Want to know what others are doing? Why not check out the University of West London’s case study on how they use Office 365 Education to start a life-long connection to their students, or read how Warwickshire County Council created WeLearn365 for all schools in the county?

If you’re using Google, maybe it’s time to look at Office 365 Education – Birkenhead Sixth Form College did and they love it!

It’s a very exciting time to be an Office 365 Education customer. Student Advantage availability is just around the corner, and we’ve put a few posts up discussing how to get it, but it’s also important to consider how you’ll be deploying and managing Office 365 ProPlus.

Deploying and Managing Office 365 ProPlus

My colleague across the water, Mark Garcia, recently put a post up covering the various options for deploying Office 365 ProPlus, but I found this deck which I thought I would also share for you to view and download (there are videos in the deck).

Getting Student Advantage

Remember, Student Advantage is just the name of the benefit – the actual technology, the bit that will make sense to anyone outside of education, is Office 365 ProPlus. If you’re searching online, on TechNet, or MSDN, you might find that Office 365 ProPlus gets you to the answers you need.

We have a few posts that cover:

1. How to get Student Advantage if you’re an existing Office 365 Education customer.
2. How to get Student Advantage if you’re not an existing Office 365 Education customer.
3. How your students can access the software once you’ve assigned the licences.

And don’t forget, TechNet has a great page on choosing the best deployment method to use; so check that out too!

What are you doing?

Everyone I speak to is excited about being able to offer their students Office 365 ProPlus at no additional cost¹ and we’d like to hear about your plans and successes in the comments. Will this be a little pre-Christmas surprise for your students, or will you roll it out near exam season so your students have the latest tools to revise and study at home, or something else altogether?

Let us know, we’d love to share your story!

¹ Institutions must cover 100% of their faculty/staff for Office on their volume licensing agreement to qualify for the Student Advantage benefit. For more information, please speak to your licensing reseller.

In our last post, we looked at how an institution can associate Student Advantage licences with an existing Office 365 Education tenant. Today, we'll answer the question “how do I get Student Advantage in Office 365 Education?” from a student perspective.

Once an institution has allocated the Office 365 ProPlus licences that underpin the Student Advantage benefit students will not necessarily see anything different in their experience of Office 365. So, in the spirit of sharing, here are a couple of ideas for how to spread the word:

• Send an email to all students informing them of the new software available to them.
• Promote a link to the software through your student portal.
• Put posters up around school / campus advertising the new software.
• Use social media to communicate the new benefit.

The direct link, if you want to include it in communication, is: https://portal.microsoftonline.com/OLS/MySoftware.aspx but without the direct link, here’s what you need to know…

Students will need to sign into Office 365 with their credentials in the usual way, such as through your SSO portal, directly into OWA, etc. Once there, click on the little sprocket in the top right-hand corner, and select Office 365 settings from the menu.

This will take you to your main settings page, where you can see all sorts of interesting things, but in the context of Student Advantage and Office 365 ProPlus we’re only interested in the software link.

Clicking the software link will take you to the page, below, where you can access your Office 365 ProPlus software!

Simply select the appropriate language, and whether you want the 32-bit or 64-bit (click advanced to unlock that option) and then click install. Your Office 365 ProPlus experience will then begin.

If you’re running Mac OS X then this screen may look a little different to let you download Office for Mac 2011.

Office Mobile for iOS and Android

One of the additional benefits of Student Advantage is that Office 365 ProPlus enables the use of Office Mobile for iOS for iPhones and Office Mobile for Android for Android phones. I wrote about this a little while ago, with links to the various stores (iTunes and Google Play).

The apps themselves are free, but require an active subscription to use. Download the app to your device, and sign in with your Office 365 credentials to get started.

Guest blog post from Gerald Haigh. Gerald writes regularly for the Microsoft Education series of blogs.

Ramandeep has been absent from school for five weeks following a road accident. Recovery is slow, and there’s still no firm date for her return. The school sends work home with her brother, but, as she tells her mum, she feels more and more cut off.

‘I just don’t feel I go to that school any more. I sometimes think they’ve forgotten me. When I first had the accident it was all fuss, and visits, and flowers and chocolates. Now I hardly ever see any of them.’

Next day, Ramandeep’s mum went into school and spoke to Ramandeep’s year leader.

‘She’s really down I hate seeing her like this. It can affect her recovery, and her work is going to suffer.’

He understood and promised to speak to Ramandeep’s teachers and her friends, but he also made a mental note to follow up on a thought that niggled in the back of his mind. He went off to see the network manager.

‘Sal, you know when we took on Office 365 Education, and we decided to move our email to it, and then get started on a proper online portal. Well, isn’t there also something called “Lync”? I wonder if we could use it to solve this little problem.’

He explained what he had in mind. Sal thought it was a brilliant idea, and entirely possible, given a bit of advice from Microsoft, and a visit to the local university where they used Lync all the time to save travelling costs between two campuses.

Within a few days, the year leader and Sal had been round to see Ramandeep, with a tablet borrowed from the pilot ‘Surface’ project running in Year Seven, set up for Lync. And suddenly, there on her little screen was a tightly framed gaggle of familiar laughing faces – Ramandeeps’s friends who’d been prepared in advance.

That was just the start. Over the next few weeks, Ramandeep had Lync tutorials with her teachers, about the homework they’d set. She ‘sat in’ on some lessons with her own class and, of course, had some personal sessions with friends. Many of the ideas, such as being able to take her turn at reading in assembly with the aid of a smartboard in the hall, came from Ramandeep herself.

Best of all, so far as Ramandeep was concerned, was that when she shared in a classroom session, she could record it to watch offline later.

‘That’s great, I often get things much better the second time,’ she said.

(When Mr Johnson heard she’s said that, he made a mental note to discuss lesson pacing with his colleagues)

‘All this must be costing the school a fortune one way or another,’ said Ramandeep’s mum to Mr Johnson on one of her visits.

‘Oh no,’ he said. ‘It’s completely free to schools as part of our Office 365 package.’

‘Unbelievable,’ said Ramandeep’s mum. ‘I just know how much money and trouble went into the video conferencing set-up we have at work. I wonder if they know about this?’

By Christmas that year, Ramandeep was back at school, but the experience the school had with Lync during that time led to a whole lot of interesting innovations including screen sharing by staff during planning sessions. Integration with ‘OneNote’ also enabled staff working group members to share their ideas on what they were seeing on their screens.

For the near future, again based on the experience with Ramandeep, senior staff are hoping to run ‘Virtual Parents Evenings’. Obviously these won’t replace face-to-face meetings. The idea is to make Lync meetings available to specific parents who have genuine problems getting into school – they may be housebound, or work difficult shifts. Again the ability to record sessions is going to be really useful.