UK Education Cloud Blog

Synchronising passwords with Office 365

jamesbmarshall — Tue, 04 Jun 2013 08:43:00 GMT

I have some exciting news!

One of the most popular features of Live@edu, from a “techy” perspective, was the ability to synchronise the passwords from your local AD user accounts into the cloud using the Password Change Notification Service (PCNS). This was a great way to provide a consistent sign-in experience to users since their password would always be the same in both their AD account and their email account – simple!

In Office 365 we introduced the ability to have federated authentication using ADFS – this gave institutions a more flexible solution for managing authentication for their users, and allowed a true single sign-on implementation for users. One username, one password.

Of course, as awesome as ADFS is to have, it does sometimes require institutions to deploy extra hardware, and that can mean extra cost. At a time when schools, colleges and universities across the UK are being driven hard to reduce costs and be more efficient with their spending it can often be a challenge to make a highly available and robust ADFS infrastructure a reality.

Connect Windows Server AD to Windows Azure AD

Yesterday Alex Simmons, director of program management, posted up on the Active Directory Team Blog:

I'm happy to let you know that as of last Friday (5/31) we've made it dead simple to connect AD to Azure AD, enabling users to log into Office 365, Windows Azure and any other cloud app integrated with Windows Azure AD using their on-premise username and password. We've done this by updating Windows Azure Active Directory Sync Agent (a.k.a. DirSync) adding the ability to sync hashes of users' on-premise AD passwords into Windows Azure AD.

Tool available now!

You can download the new version of DirSync from TechNet or via the Office 365 portal today. My colleague Mark Garcia, over on the US education cloud blog, has posted up a great FAQ all about the new version with a screenshot guide of how to replace your existing DirSync version with the new one!

SkyDrive Pro client for Windows now available

jamesbmarshall — Fri, 24 May 2013 13:11:09 GMT

This week the SharePoint team had something pretty cool to announce! The SkyDrive Pro client is something that a lot of education customers ask me about, so I’m really excited that it’s available now.

Here’s what the team had to say:

We are pleased to announce that the SkyDrive Pro sync client is now available for Windows and can be downloaded here. This standalone client allows users of SharePoint 2013 and SharePoint Online in Office 365 to sync their personal SkyDrive Pro and any SharePoint 2013 or Office 365 team site document libraries to their local machine for access to important content on and offline. The SkyDrive Pro client can be installed standalone and does not require any version of Office to be installed. It can also be installed side-by-side with previous versions of Office (Office 2010, Office 2007).

Please note if you have one of the following versions of Office 2013 installed, then you already have the SkyDrive Pro sync client and do not need to install it separately:

Office 365 Pro Plus

Office 365 Small Business Premium

Office Professional Plus 2013

Once installed, simply click SYNC in the top right corner of your SkyDrive Pro library, SharePoint 2013 or Office 365 team site document library and you'll be on your way to keep your files in sync across your machines. Happy syncing with SkyDrive Pro--cloud storage for employees!

Your Privacy is Our Priority

Sarika Rao — Wed, 22 May 2013 09:28:17 GMT

Microsoft has been investing in a comprehensive privacy program, consumer education and policy initiatives for more than a decade. Our customers tell us they expect strong privacy protections to be built into our products, devices and services, and for companies to be responsible stewards of their data. We prioritize privacy and take our privacy responsibilities seriously. We take steps to use people’s data responsibly, be transparent about our privacy practices, and offer people more meaningful privacy choices. Privacy by Design at Microsoft means building meaningful choices into our products, devices and services to help people protect their privacy and control use of their information. By collaborating with advocates, industry partners and governments worldwide, we develop solutions and promote effective public policies to help meet the privacy challenges of the 21st century.

Our recent survey of people in the US, UK, France and Germany showed that while the vast majority (85 percent) is concerned about the privacy of their online information, only 51 percent of UK respondents are taking action. That’s why we are establishing a dialogue with consumers, government, business and others to help address concerns and develop common solutions.

To this end, we recently launched a consumer awareness campaign in selected European countries including the UK. You can visit our new “Your Privacy” web page. The page offers resources as well as a quiz called “Your Privacy Type” (YPT) to help you understand your privacy behaviours. By asking a few simple questions, the YPT can quickly reveal your personal privacy type, along with a number of recommendations for improving privacy.

We hope you take the quiz and browse through the useful resources available on the site to help you manage your privacy needs better.

Over 18 million students and staff to benefit from faster, more secure cloud-computing

jamesbmarshall — Tue, 21 May 2013 08:53:14 GMT

As part of our on-going commitment to add value to the education community we serve, we are thrilled to be working with Janet to provide additional support and services to their user base.

Janet provides and develops a network infrastructure to support world-class research and education to over 18 million end users and helps academic institutions to better communicate, collaborate and co-operate, globally.

With the Janet network now peered with the our datacentre, both Microsoft and Janet can build on this strong and unique foundation to add additional services that reduce costs and help make the community more competitive.

With the Cloud Services for Education agreement service already helping institutions, such as Goldsmiths, save in excess of £20,000 in legal due diligence, we are excited about the next stage in the evolution of our work with Janet which is focused around Azure.

The press release from Janet below covers these exciting developments in more detail, but in essence, with our joint dedication to the sector, Janet and Microsoft is able to offer improved access to infrastructure and application services such as websites, virtual learning environments and research projects.

A launch event for the strategic agreement, where a formal signing of the agreement will take place, is scheduled for the 21st May at Goldsmiths, University of London, and the full press release from Janet is shown below.

We look forward to sharing additional updates and successes associated with our work with Janet on the blog over the coming weeks and months.

Over 18 million students and staff to benefit from faster, more secure cloud-computing

More than 18 million students, staff and researchers at institutions across the UK could start to benefit from a faster and more secure connection when using their institution’s cloud-based IT services, thanks to a new peering arrangement between Microsoft and Janet, the UK’s research and education network.

This new agreement enables improved access to infrastructure and application services such as websites, virtual learning environments and research projects. Janet has recently become part of the Jisc group, the UK’s champion for digital technology in research and education.

Connecting the networks privately eliminates the need to traverse data over the public internet. This enables a high bandwidth connection for students and staff to use Windows Azure. Bandwidth is managed, ensuring high-speed delivery with no delay or latency.

The move to peer the Microsoft Windows Azure data centre to the Janet network comes as part of a new strategic alliance between the two organisations, being signed at Goldsmiths, University of London on Tuesday 21 May (press welcome to attend by prior arrangement).

Professor Anne Trefethen, Chief Information Officer, University of Oxford: “In the UK, higher education institutions are fortunate to have high speed network services as provided by Janet. The capability afforded by Janet’s peering with Microsoft’s Azure Cloud with high-bandwidth secure connections creates new opportunities for researchers and the University community as a whole.”

Professor of Computing Science at Newcastle University Paul Watson comments: “Cloud computing has the potential to revolutionise research by offering vast compute resources on-demand. At Newcastle University, we already have over £20M of research projects that are supported by the cloud. However, one of the major barriers holding back further cloud adoption is the time it takes to transfer large datasets from the lab to the cloud for analysis. This new link between Janet and the Azure Cloud removes this barrier, and will allow a far greater range of research projects to fully exploit the benefits of cloud computing.”

The alliance agreement also means any UK education institution can benefit from standard terms and conditions on Microsoft’s cloud-based productivity software suite Office 365, negotiated by Janet.

An early beneficiary of this arrangement is Goldsmiths, which is also one of a select group of institutions responsible for initiating work on the alliance. Basem El-Haddadeh, Director of IT Services at Goldsmiths said: “The work on Office 365 will save the sector considerable time and money in legal due diligence and speed up adoption of Office 365. We’re really pleased with the roll-out at Goldsmiths and our staff and students are already enjoying using the new system. I’m looking forward to the benefits the strategic alliance can bring.”

“Through the peering and strategic alliance, we are demonstrating our commitment to UK research and education institutes’ increasing desire to access cloud technologies and we are complementing our world class fibre network with Microsoft’s leading technologies to support the sector,” said Dan Perry, Director of Product and Marketing at Janet.

Steve Beswick, Director of Education, Microsoft Ltd said: “We are delighted to be working with Janet to provide additional value-added products and services to the research and education community. We have a long-standing relationship with this sector and are looking forward to more collaborative working with Janet to grow our offering.”

END

Partner Offering: Live@edu Upgrade Training

Kyle Edmund Hayes — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 19:28:45 GMT

Oxford Computer Group, a Microsoft Gold Partner, are running a series of one day training events that cover how to complete your upgrade from Live@edu to Office 365 Education. In their own words:

“This course provides an introduction to the process of upgrading your Microsoft Live@edu cloud-based email service to Microsoft's new Office 365 cloud offering. Every institution using Live@edu will have to make this change this year, and many seem unaware of the implications. We examine the reasons for the upgrade, the differences between the platforms, and present the options that are available for getting successfully from one to the other. At the end of the course you will have a sound understanding of the process itself, the things that you will need to do and the decisions that your institution will have to take…”

The course will cover:

A brief overview of what the Live@edu to Office 365 upgrade is and entails
Options available for Service Provisioning & Licensing
An introduction to SSO with ADFS and Shibboleth
The upgrade process & what’s involved
How to get successfully from one platform to the other
Alumni solution

Check the date and register now!

And don’t forget, the upgrade wiki is always a useful tool for finding out information too!

Alumni Address Book Policy in Office 365 Education

jamesbmarshall — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 10:49:52 GMT

We recently took a look at one of the ways you can address the question of supporting alumni users in Office 365 Education, and I mentioned that you would need to look to the new Office 365 Education in order to provide custom address book policies in order to restrict access to your institution GAL by your alumni users.

There are a few reasons why implementing this is a good idea:

You probably don’t want your alumni users being able to view the details of your current students and faculty.
You will also likely want to maintain the privacy and separation by stopping your students and faculty from seeing all your alumni details, too!
Even more importantly, you’ll almost certainly want to stop alumni from seeing each other – as this list grows over time there'll be a lot of names in that list. Who knows, one day some of them might be famous!

What You’ll Need

In order to configure this you’ll need to ensure a few things:

You’re running the new Office 365 (sometimes known as “Wave 15” or the 2013-style).
You’ve enabled address book policy routing.
To use any cmdlets that require the Address List role, you need to add the role to a role group. For details, see the “Add a role to a role assignment policy” section of Manage Role Assignment Policies.
To decide on, and set, a marker to identify your alumni users; for example, using one of the custom attributes to store a value such as “alumni”.

Step One: Create the Address Lists

Address book policies contain address lists, so to begin we need to create an alumni address list for our users, and a blank resource address list for our resources (assuming we don’t want alumni users to see any rooms or resources in the their GAL).

Resource List:

We’ll connect to our tenant using Windows PowerShell and run the following command:

New-AddressList -name "AL_Alumni_Resources" -RecipientFilter {(((RecipientDisplayType -eq 'ConferenceRoomMailbox') -or (RecipientDisplayType -eq 'SyncedConferenceRoomMailbox')) -and (CustomAttribute3 -eq "nullresource"))} -DisplayName "Alumni Room List"

This creates an address list called AL_Alumni_Resources that contains rooms where custom attribute 3 is equal to “nullresource”. This is a bit of a trick since there are no resources with that value, so we get a blank address list as a result. There are probably more elegant ways to do this, but this one works.

Alumni Address List

Again, in PowerShell, we’ll run:

New-AddressList -name "AL_Alumni" -RecipientFilter {(RecipientType -eq 'UserMailbox') -and (CustomAttribute2 -eq "alumni")} –DisplayName “Alumni Address List”

This creates an address list called AL_Alumni that contains users where custom attribute 2 is equal to “alumni”.

Global Address List

To create a new GAL we’ll run:

New-GlobalAddressList -name "GAL_Alumni" -RecipientFilter {(CustomAttribute2 -eq "alumni")}

This creates a global address list called GAL_Alumni that contains objects where custom attribute 2 is equal to “alumni”.

Offline Address Book

To set up the OAB we’ll run:

New-OfflineAddressBook -name "OAB_Alumni" -AddressLists "GAL_Alumni"

This creates a offline address book called OAB_Alumni that contains the alumni GAL.

Step Two: Create Alumni Address Book Policy

Now that we’ve got our address lists in place we can create the policy that ties it all together, so in PowerShell we run:

New-AddressBookPolicy -name "ABP_Alumni" -AddressLists "AL_Alumni" -OfflineAddressBook "\OAB_Alumni" -GlobalAddressList "\GAL_Alumni" -RoomList "\AL_Alumni_Resources"

Step Three: Assign the Address Book Policy to users

Now for the moment of truth: applying our newly created policy to our alumni users:

Get-Mailbox -resultsize unlimited | where {$_.CustomAttribute2 -eq "alumni"} | Set-Mailbox -AddressBookPolicy "ABP_Alumni"

Step Four: Test

If we log into OWA with a test alumni user we'll see that if we browse to the people tab, we get the following view:

Notice that on the left column, under directory we see the two address lists we created – they’re both empty!

Step Five: Hide alumni from address lists

The last step, now that we’re satisfied we’ve hidden the rest of our users and lists from our alumni, is to hide our alumni from any other address lists. This is much simpler you’ll be please to know!

Get-Mailbox -resultsize unlimited | where {$_.CustomAttribute2 -eq "alumni"} | Set-Mailbox -HiddenFromAddressListsEnabled $true

Things to note

I’m not a PowerShell expert (sadly!) so there may well be better and more efficient ways to do this.
If you have large numbers of users to apply this to you may hit PowerShell throttling policies, so be aware that you may need to do this in chunks of users over a period of time, rather than every user in one go.
Test thoroughly – this is just one way and probably won’t fit every scenario. Make sure you test before rolling out!

Find out more

For a more in depth guide on address book policy procedures check out TechNet which contains all the information I needed to structure this article.

Two Accounts after Live@edu to Office 365 Upgrade

jamesbmarshall — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 13:51:46 GMT

Check out this video explaining the two accounts users will have after their institution upgrades from Live@edu to Office 365 Education.

IT Academy: Office 365 Education Training & Certification

jamesbmarshall — Thu, 14 Mar 2013 11:53:53 GMT

The upgrade process from Live@edu to Office 365 Education has begun, and if your organisation has an IT Academy subscription then you have access to the Office 365 training material and the ability to gain a Microsoft certification!

Through using the IT Academy, your institution’s IT staff can be completely proficient in Office 365; meaning they can deploy faster and reduce any issues that may arise when migrating users to the new environment. From a Network Manager’s point of view training is offered at academic prices, suggesting the woes of a training budget are minimised.

This means that you can use IT Academy to support your institution’s adoption and implementation of Office 365; permitting the full promotion of features and benefits to all staff and students, allowing learning objectives to be enhanced.

For instance, you have all of these resources available with the IT Academy on Office 365:

To learn more about IT Academy Certifications and indeed how the MOS 365 Certifications can help with your Office 365 Education deployment and training please email educationuk@microsoft.com to register for our FREE Certification Roadmap Webinar Tuesday 19^th March 12-1pm.

Top User Tips #10–Blogging in SharePoint Online

jamesbmarshall — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 11:46:27 GMT

It’s time for our final post in the top user tips series, and today it’s all about blogging in SharePoint Online. You might also want to check out top tip #2 about social networking, and top tip #7 about following content in SharePoint Online as well.

As a teacher or a student, blogging can help document achievements, showcase exemplar work and also share knowledge and best practice. The beauty of doing this via SharePoint Online is that it can be made private, is searchable across the institution and accessed with your Office 365 ID. Blogging in SharePoint Online also takes advantage of the new social networking features of the new Office 365 Education, meaning you can like, follow, mention and tag people and content with ease.

Here’s an example of a simple blog (click to enlarge!):

Setting up a blog site in SharePoint Online couldn’t be easier. Here’s a video that explains, in about a minute, how to do it:

&lt;P&gt;&lt;/P&gt;&lt;/div&gt;&lt;/DIV&gt;&lt;/DIV&gt;&lt;/LI&gt;&lt;/UL&gt;&lt;/DIV&gt;&lt;/DIV&gt;&lt;/DIV&gt;&lt;/DIV&gt;&lt;/DIV&gt;&lt;/DIV&gt;&lt;/DIV&gt;&lt;/DIV&gt;&lt;/DIV&gt;&lt;/FORM&gt;&lt;/BODY&gt;&lt;/HTML&gt;

Top User Tips #9–Multiple Co-Authoring in Office Web Apps

jamesbmarshall — Tue, 12 Mar 2013 16:03:18 GMT

In the eighth instalment of our top user tips we looked at Excel Surveys using the Excel Web App, and today we’re going to look at the co-authoring features that can help you analyse that data, brainstorm ideas, and work collaboratively with your classmates and colleagues in real time, via the browser.

Document collaboration is a critical element to working effectively in the classroom. The combination of SharePoint Online and Office offers a spectrum of document collaboration methods, whether it is co-authoring a spreadsheet or routing a school field trip plan through a workflow. Understanding the ways you can collaborate on documents is vital to making the best choice for your needs and improving your productivity as a student or educator.

Here are two examples of the Excel, and Word Web Apps being used by two people to edit the same work (click on them to enlarge!):

Without having to download and open the document in the full Office client students and teachers can work together in real-time; and the beauty is that the Web Apps work across a variety of devices, here’s the same spreadsheet from above on an iPad:

Getting started is really simple – check out our fourth top tips post all about SkyDrive Pro to see how you can easily upload your content into Office 365 and in minutes you can be working with others!