Ben Nunney, who writes the UK Live@edu blog, has just finished updating the Live@edu Implementation Guide. It covers a wide range of advice and guidance that is helpful as you plan to move your email services to the free Live@edu service, based in our cloud datacentres in Dublin. (This link will tell you more about what Live@edu is)
The guide is specifically written for IT managers and others who are responsible for the college IT infrastructure. Some of the guidance that you’ll find include:
If you’re planning a deployment, or your curious to see just how much control you still retain when you move to an outsourced mail service, then Ben’s guide is incredibly helpful.
Download the Live@edu Implementation Guide
We spend a lot of time talking to customers about Live@edu - whether it's talking about deployment specifics or giving a higher level overview. And so, on Tuesday 26th May, we hosted the first Whistle-stop LiveMeeting for the Further Education sector.
We spent 15 minutes giving an overview of the service, and then fielded a huge number of questions from many of the 30 institutions - some existing customers, some new to the service - for the remainder of the hour-long LiveMeeting. Below is the video recording of that first 15 minutes, and some links on where to go and get some more information on Live@edu.
A 15 minute tour of Live@edu in Further Education
If that's been enough to whet your appetites for Live@edu, get in touch with the team or check out some of the links below for more information and further reading:
There are normally over 50 UK Education attendees at Tech∙Ed Europe, which is in Berlin this November 8 – 12. It’s a full week of deep technical education, hands-on-learning and opportunities to connect with Microsoft and Community experts one-on-one. The main reason that people attend is to get deep training to our technologies, as well as the chance to see what’s going on across the breadth of our product portfolio.
Although the full conference price is €1,895, there is a discount code available to staff and students at UK Education institutions, which reduces the price by more than 50% to €795.
I’m not allowed to publish the discount code on this blog, so just drop me an email and I will send you the code via email.
If you don’t qualify for the academic discount, then remember you can still save €500 by registering before 5th July 2010
The organisers describe the event this way:
Having attended a few years ago, I came away with a brain full of information, so I’m definitely a fan of the event.
On the agenda, the Technical Track includes:
We recently held a well attended workshop for FE colleges looking to deploy Live@edu, and have now made the content from the day available online for you to download and review yourselves - whether you could make it to the meeting or not. Whether you're just thinking about moving some of your communication & collaboration services out to the cloud, or are already on the road to deploying Live@edu, the sldies & documentation linked below will help you manage your deployment more effrectively, and go through many of the common key devisions that need to be made before you go ahead and deploy.
Live@edu Implimentation Guide | Live@edu FE Workshop Slides
This year, we’re on schedule to launch almost one new product every week. Of course, if you like discovering new technology, then that’s a good thing. But if you’re managing a big network of computers for other people – which is most of you reading this blog – then it also comes with challenges!
But these days, you are likely to find that many of our significant new release – like Windows, Office and Windows Server – will come with enhanced deployment and planning tools.
For Office 2010, there’s the free Office Environment Assessment Tool, which helps you to find out what applications you have installed, what add-ins are used in Office (including the ones which interact with Office but aren’t registered as add-ins). It scans your environment, and then produces a pair of nice reports.
There’s three steps to use this toolkit to get ready for Office 2010:
Are you rolling out Office 2010 this summer? Well, here’s some good news:
We’ve just had the new Office 2010 posters delivered, to replenish our stock of Office 2007 posters that had dwindled to zero in the last few weeks. The last set had four different posters, whereas this time we’ve got seven free posters for use around the college, to inform your students and staff of the benefits of the new software:
If you’d like a set of free posters, then email Mir Baloch, including your name, college name and address, and she will put a tube full of posters in the mail to you.
If you just can’t wait, and you want to download the PDFs, then click here to get them from my SkyDrive folder.
If you’re reading this from outside of the UK, then I’m afraid I can’t post out the tubes – they’re big and heavy. However, you can still download the digital versions above, and you may be able to get alternatives from the Microsoft team in your own country.
With all of the changes in the way that ICT is being used in learning, there’s an increasing demand for staff to have remote access to college systems, from home or other times when they are away from your campus. Sometimes it can be enough to provide access to your MLE, but it is becoming increasingly common that a lecturer or member of the leadership team needs to have more comprehensive secure access to the college network. In the past, the single solution for doing this was to implement a Virtual Private Network (VPN), but with Windows 7 there are many other ways to provide secure remote access to your networks – giving you ‘Anywhere Access’.
There are a number of key parts in Windows 7 that can be used to create anywhere access for staff:
The information above is only a brief summary – to read more detail about each of these, then take a look at the Windows Team blog post “Understanding anywhere access with Windows 7”
Whether you will be deploying Windows 7 over the summer or just want to know more about what is involved, this one hour live meeting will give you an overview of the tools and methods available to deploy Windows 7 effectively, as well as giving you the chance to ask questions. This Live Meeting session will be jointly presented by Microsoft and one of our education partners, Design & Management Systems, who have great experience in helping a number of UK education organisations to effectively migrate to Windows 7.
We will look at the tools and techniques available to streamline your deployments including:
The information level in this session will be relevant for IT managers and IT support technicians.
As it is a Live Meeting, you don’t need to leave your desk, and no travel is needed – you can simply logon to the Live Meeting website, and you can join in, and ask questions as we go along.
You’ll need to register in advance here
You will need a PC with a web browser and either headphones or a telephone to hear the audio - To save time before the meeting, you can easily check your system to make sure it is ready to use Microsoft Office Live Meeting, using this link