Easier school collaboration and increased cloud storage with SkyDrive Pro.
It's extremely evident that today’s learning environments and student preferences are focused on producing more and more content via digital mediums in the form of rich Microsoft Office documents, interactive games, photo and video libraries. One challenge that arises as a result of this shift, is having a way to store and access this content anywhere, anytime, regardless of device. The majority of users tend to choose a consumer cloud storage service like SkyDrive or use a school file server. Valuable knowledge and content is not typically manageable or searchable by schools in the case of consumer cloud storage and file servers can be unreliable and hard to access outside of school grounds.
With Office 365 for Education , Microsoft provides a rich set of enterprise grade services via the cloud which can be managed by a school or preferred partner. Office 365 for Education demonstrates the power of highly available, modern cloud services that can help facilitate curriculum ICT integration.
Take the opportunity to see this vision in action by registering for one of our Windows in the Classroom seminars.
One of the key services included in Office 365 for Education is SkyDrive Pro. It's the place where staff and students can store, sync, and share their files across multiple devices with ease and security. Until last week, 7GB per user made up the available storage for SkyDrive Pro, as part of Microsoft’s evolving and maturing cloud service offerings this storage has now increased to 25GB per user by default.
With SkyDrive Pro you can collaborate with others in real time and edit documents from virtually anywhere via a web browser using Office Web Apps. Accessing your files from multiple devices (including Windows Phone, Windows 8, iOS, and Android devices) is a cinch with native SkyDrive Pro and Office Mobile apps .
There are three new significant improvements to SkyDrive Pro for Office 365 for Education subscribers - to help you be more productive:
- 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.
We have some excellent resources that can help you learn how SkyDrive Pro could be best used at your school.
Check out Training: Sync libraries using SkyDrive Pro.
We also have a great quick reference card attached below that would be a good way to gain adoption of SkyDrive Pro and Office 365.
You can subscribe to our official announcements for Office 365 including the recent SkyDrive Pro and Exchange Online storage increases on our Office 365 technology blog .