If you’re looking at deploying Office 365 for education at your institution, but you’re wondering what the best way to prepare is, then look no further! Over on the phenomenally useful Office 365 community there is a wiki page that steps through all the things you need to think about when preparing for an Office…
Year: 2012
Georgia State University Switches to Microsoft Office 365, Saves $1 Million in Operating Costs
Great news from Georgia! GSU has rolled out Office 365 as a replacement for their legacy GroupWise environment and users are now enjoying anytime, anywhere, any device access to their email and other collaborative services. I urge you to check out the case study, here are a few choice quotes: “There were several problems with…
How To Use Excel Web App To Survey Your Students
Getting real time feedback from your students and staff can be a challenge. I’m a firm believer in finding better ways to engage students and teachers and the new Excel Web App in SharePoint Online (at which you can take a sneak peak in the new Office 365 preview) has a new feature that can…
Customising Your AD FS 2.0 Sign-in Pages
If you’re deploying Active Directory Federation Services 2.0 in your institution to enable single sign-on you might want to customize the default look and feel with some custom text, logos and colours to make it fit in with your brand and to make it more familiar to your users. Or just something different from the…
Exploring the new Office Web Apps – Excel Web Forms
Today we are going to highlight one of the features in the Excel Web Apps, which can be found as part of the new Office 365 demo environment. The Office Web apps are part of the SharePoint Online experience and can be used to either create new content or edit existing Office documents once they…
Scripting License Assignment in Office 365 for education
As more and more education institutions take advantage of Office 365 for education’s powerful capabilities a question that comes up is: how can you script license assignment for your staff, students and alumni so that you don’t have to manually go through the process each time you enroll new users? Thankfully there are a couple…
User soft-delete and Dirsync filtering enabled
A huge request I get from my education customers deploying Office 365 for Education is how do you filter out OUs, Domains or users from a Dirsync Appliance? The answer prior to this week was you could enable filtering within Dirsync however it was in an unsupported manner. Great news now that soft-delete has…
License assignment for Education customers
We continue to look at better ways to do license assignment in EDU. The initial scripts provide quick way to do assignment but lacked in granularity. When a customer wants to apply licenses we wanted to look at the source AD to track against a single attribute for the license assignment. Please follow the…
Live@edu Upgrade to Office 365 for education
If you’re a Live@edu customer you might be wondering to yourself where you can find out more information about the upgrade to Office 365 for education. What do I need to plan for? When can I do it? How long does it take? What about SSO, ILM, PCNS, etc.? These are just some of the…
DirSync Now Supports Filtering
Early adopters of Office 365 for education will know that the DirSync tool that you can deploy to synchronise your local Active Directory with Office 365 did not allow you to filter the objects that are synchronised (i.e. by OU, user attribute or domain). The good news is that this has changed, and you can…