Office 365 ProPlus Benefit for Students

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Earlier this week, the Microsoft Worldwide Education team made an announcement regarding Office 365 ProPlus for students.  We took some additional steps to make it easier for students to get this software, with little to no impact on IT Departments.  We hope students at all schools will take advantage of this benefit.  Please review this note and the FAQ.

Last year Microsoft announced a benefit for students that gave them access to an Office 365 ProPlus subscription if their school purchases Office for all faculty and staff.

Since then, we heard a lot from students, educators and school IT departments that:

  • Many are excited for all students and educators to work toward learning outcomes using the latest versions of familiar Office programs like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and more, across devices they use every day.
  • Microsoft could make it easier to provision users, order and assign licenses for Office 365 ProPlus, SharePoint and OneDrive for business.

As a result of this feedback Microsoft is announcing Office 365 ProPlus benefits for students immediately - and - coming in December for educators and staff. These benefits add flexibility in how to provide these services to your education community.

How does it work?

Students (and soon educators/staff) who have an email address from your school can sign themselves up from Office.com/GetOffice365 and get:

  • Office 365 ProPlus: Applications like Word, PowerPoint, Excel and more on up to 5 PCs and Macs and up to 5 mobile devices (such as iPads, iPhones and Android phones)
  • OneDrive for business with 1TB of cloud storage that can be synchronized for use when offline.

Students who already have an Office 365 account can use their existing user name and password. If you have not assigned licenses to students, one will be automatically assigned to them when they sign in. 

You continue to control managing the services in a manner that fits for your organization. Microsoft is providing you with a set of 1M licenses for your students at no additional cost. You have the option of assigning these licenses yourself through the Office 365 admin portal, or you can do nothing and students will be able to sign up themselves and activate the licenses automatically when a student uses the self-sign up website. The availability of these licenses does not impact any preferences previously set on license assignment.

The benefits of allowing students (and soon educators/staff) to sign up on their own is that you save time because you do not have to provision users by ordering and assigning licenses for Office 365 ProPlus. Self-sign up is a fast way to enable your educational community to access these benefits immediately.

If you need to, this FAQ articulates how to take control of the self-provisioning of students, faculty and staff, or the assignment of licenses.

There are no administrative actions your institution needs to take to enable these new self-sign-up and auto licensing features. Simply communicate the availability to your students using our student marketing kit at Office.com/GetOffice365Resources. (Faculty resources coming soon!)