Yesterday in discussions about what content goes onto this blog, and the others I write, I promised somebody I’d write a list of Microsoft team blogs that I’d recommend reading. The discussion was started by the question “Does your blog contain everything that’s relevant to education and Microsoft?”. And the answer is definitely “No” – I only have the bandwidth to write about the bits I think are really important or really interesting to people interested in Microsoft news on education IT. There are lots of other related blogs that focus on specific products or technologies.
Saying I’d write a list turned out to be easier than doing it, but here is, finally, a list of blogs that you might want to consider reading/subscribing to.
Firstly, in addition to this one, there’s five key UK specific blogs, written by members of the Microsoft education team here in Reading
Then there’s some worldwide ones, written outside of the UK
There are thousands of blogs written by either Microsoft teams, or individual employees, so if you’re looking for something specific, the best way is to search on the Microsoft Communities page (which maintains a list of 1,686 blogs today – but that’s still only a small proportion of the total)
Search the blogs list to find others
Make a note in your diary - Tech∙Ed Europe returns to Berlin this November 8 – 12. As usual, it’s a full week of deep technical education, hands-on-learning and opportunities to connect with Microsoft and Community experts one-on-one. Be among the first to receive event announcements and notification when event registration opens by joining the Tech∙Ed Europe email list.
Although there is an early bird discount conference pass (€1,395), details will follow on academic discounts. I’ll include more details here on how to register as an academic customer when it’s announced.
Tech∙Ed provides the most comprehensive technical education across Microsoft’s suite of released, or soon to be released, products, solutions and services. Tech∙Ed is for IT professionals and developers who are involved in implementing, deploying or building solutions using Microsoft technologies.
The chances of persuading your senior management team to let you fly over to Vegas for the annual Microsoft Management Summit is pretty slim. So last week’s event went ahead without many UK delegates.
Fortunately, the UK team have put together a “Best Of…” event, where you can get all of the best content from the summit, packed into a full day’s agenda on Tuesday 18th May in central London. And unlike the Vegas event, which cost $2,000+, this event is free.
Best of Microsoft Management Summit UK 2010 will provide the best possible opportunity to learn about the latest IT Management products, solutions and technologies from Microsoft and how to apply them in your organisation. With a number of significant management product releases and announcements planned from Microsoft in the coming year, including some early Beta releases, this is an opportunity you won't want to miss!
This 1-day event will provide you with an understanding of the latest technical updates on Desktop, Datacenter and Cloud management features and solutions from Microsoft. The event will share expert knowledge and information, covering current System Center products as well as Windows platform management solutions for virtualization of servers, desktops and applications.
The agenda includes:
Find out more, including the full agenda, and reserve your free place
Yesterday, I wrote about the Ultimate Steal offer, and the two key reasons to mention it to students before June (the price goes up with Office 2010, but if they buy now they get a no-cost upgrade to Office 2010 as part of our Tech Guarantee programme).
UK students have some of the highest rates of usage of Microsoft Office in the world, and also one of the highest rates of ‘mis-licensing’.
Okay, that’s me being nice. The research tells us that some students know that ‘borrowing’ software from friends & parents isn’t allowed. And the copy floating around on a blank DVD with a licence key number written on it may not quite be legit.
There are some web banners that you can use (eg on an IT Services or internal website), to remind students that the deal is just about to close (on the 15th of June). This is especially handy for those who are just about to graduate – once they leave your hallowed halls, they return to a world where ‘student deals’ disappear, and they will end up paying a lot more for the same things. And that’s true with software too. There’s unlikely to be a better deal available for them.
If you want to tell your students about the deal, especially before they leave you for the big wide world, then you can download any of the banners (you can see them all on this SkyDrive folder) and put them onto your student portal.
Download from here, and then link them to The Ultimate Steal website for the UK
But first, some insights into which ones worked where in the world…
United Kindom
Last year we used this web banner in the UK, and we know that it was pretty successful. For some reason, UK students liked something that was between “dull” and “whacky” – in our research focus groups, they said that if we were too cool, it wouldn’t be right.
United States
Students in the US seemed to respond better to a slightly plainer design. When experimenting with more graphical ones, the response rate dropped off a bit. Perhaps because they were mesmerised by the lovely colours?
Microsoft.com advertising
On www.microsoft.com, we found that students responded well to the “save 90%” message. But we were never sure if it was only students clicking it, or general visitors to the website. This is because the website is read by all kinds of people, whereas the other banners only went on websites read by students, such as university & college portals.
Australia
Oz was the interesting one. They found that students responded to something quite different. In fact, the whole marketing campaign in Australia was themed around “It’s not piracy”. And it worked very well.
We’re starting to wonder, if we were able to run a student offer next year, whether this would be a fun idea for UK students.
What do you think?
Each year we run a special offer (called The Ultimate Steal) on Microsoft Office, only for Higher & Further education students and staff who have a .ac.uk email address. It allows them to buy the software directly from Microsoft, and make a big saving on the equivalent retail price. As we get closer to the release of Office 2010, the number of students buying the software has flattened out (and who can blame them - why buy the 2007 version when Office 2010 is just around the corner?).
In previous years universities have told their students about the deal, via their email or internal IT support website, but this year less have, because students can download the Office 2010 beta for free, and then wait for the full release.
But there are two good reasons why it’s right to remind your students now about the Ultimate Steal offer, before the release of Office 2010 in June…
Since 5th March, any student or member of staff buying Office 2007 through the Ultimate Steal has been entitled to get a no-cost upgrade to Office 2010 when it is released (as a digital download).
It’s just been confirmed that when Office 2010 is launched, the price of the student offer with the new version will be increasing by around £10 (although it will still be significantly cheaper than normal retail prices)
So here’s the summary:
So there’s a brief window from now until June when students and staff can get the best of both worlds – Office 2010 at the lower Office 2007 price.
ps You can also pick up Windows 7 with a student discount from The Ultimate Steal site too
Yesterday, I blogged about the Office 2010 Overview Fact Sheets and Product Guides. I’ve now managed to get hold of some paper copies, and can drop them in the mail to you.
They’re sitting ready on the desk here, so drop us an email and we’ll pop an envelope in the post.
I think that a writer who normally writes Fortune Cookies wrote the headlines on each of the fact sheets– see if you can match up which headline goes with which software.
A
OneNote 2010
1
You really make contact
B
Excel 2010
2
Your genius comes in many forms
C
Outlook 2010
3
You look great
D
Word 2010
4
You can take it with you
E
SharePoint Workspace 2010
5
You are a model of efficiency
F
PowerPoint 2010
6
You are the author of your own success
I’ve indexed all of the different product guides for the new Office 2010 applications. There are two separate documents for most of the products – the Overview version is a short two-page summary, and then there’s a detailed Product Guide which goes into much more detail.
The Overview document is ideal for a quick staff introduction, to stick on walls, and for leaving around the IT rooms on campus – as well as for summarising the key points to help you to decide when you should consider upgrading your campus computers.
The detailed Product Guide is really useful for preparing training materials, or handouts to staff when you are starting to deploy Office 2010. It may help to enthuse them to use some of the new things where Office will help in their teaching and research - and to get them over the “Oh no, things have changed” reaction. Some of these Product Guides have more than 100 pages, so there’s no shortage of details. I also like the fact that they talk about new things that Office 2010 can do, and then show screen shots of the difference it makes.
Product
Overview
Product Guide
Download
Publisher 2010
Access 2010
Not available
InfoPath 2010
Office Web Apps
The RNIB have announced that their Windows 7 and Vista Explained books for blind and partially sighted users are now available to pre-order, and will be shipped by the end of May. It's a step-by-step guide to Windows 7 and Vista from a non-visual perspective,and is specifically written to empower blind and partially sighted computer users with whatever access technology is being used.
It may be useful for you because it has been written for trainers and people supporting users with sight loss, as well as blind and partially sighted computer users.
It’s available in the following formats:
Book
Images (sold as separate volumes)
Order a copy from the RNIB Online Shop or contact RNIB on 0303 123 9999 to place an order.
There is also an updated (and free) Microsoft Accessibility Guide for Teachers, which you may find useful
The RNIB website also gives a handy list of Accessibility Resources from Microsoft too:
There’s recently been a lot of discussion within education about different models of ICT services. Individual universities have tended to use a mix of services provided on-premise and cloud-based services . And newer models of teaching and learning have accelerated the trend towards cloud-based services – and at the very least, services which absolutely rely on a 100% reliable Internet connection. And this hybrid model, relying on both on-premise and cloud-based ICT infrastructure, looks like it is going to become more common across education. (For example, Becta say that education can’t meet it’s carbon targets unless they dramatically reduce the numbers of servers in schools and colleges, so there will be non-IT pressures to make change too.
But this doesn’t just affect education – the integration of on-premise and cloud-based services is a hot topic for all IT Directors across business and the public sector, from small local businesses to global enterprises, and for all levels of government agencies and departments.
How do all of the dots join up in this new IT services picture? Well, thinking about it has prompted me to write a summary of what’s going on with cloud-based services at Microsoft, to fill in some of the picture from an education viewpoint.
We’ve recently made a public big shift in our emphasis towards cloud-based services; but behind the scenes there have been very big changes going on for years to get ready for the day that cloud takes off right across the world.
I’m going to use ‘Cloud’ to represent all of the Internet services that users and institutions might be using. It might be a mix of desktop and web-based software, or an entirely web-based service. Either way, it’s something that involves a web-service as part of the IT delivery.
So here’s my summary of the cloud-based services that Microsoft do that may be directly relevant to education, and the essential differences.
The first service, Live@edu is education-specific, and not available outside of education. The other services are designed for a wide range of business and public sector customers, so you’ll see some overlap between the different services. Although that can feel like duplication, it also means that you’re able to select your online services rather like an a la carte menu – choosing the combination of options to match your exact needs.
Live@edu is a free hosted service, designed specifically for education, which allows you to outsource some of your IT infrastructure to the cloud. The starting point for many is email, where you keep your existing email domain (institution.ac.uk) and point it over to our email servers – and we then run an Exchange 2010 mail service from our data centres for you, with each student getting a 10GB email inbox. As part of the service, each student gets their own Windows Live ID, which also means that they can use the hosted SkyDrive service too – with 25GB of file storage hosted on the web for each student. In the future, we’ll also be integrating SharePoint into Live@edu, giving you more options for collaboration between users.
As it’s free, you can simply sign up directly at the Live@edu site
http://www.microsoft.com/uk/education/further-education/products/live-at-edu.aspx
Windows Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing operating system. This is essentially a set of services that developers, software vendors and systems integrators can use to develop applications and new business models. We host the servers in the cloud, running cloud versions of the same platforms that would normally run in-house – things like web servers or highly-available SQL servers. The developers use exactly the same tools as today to develop their applications (eg Visual Studio) on their own desktop/in-house machines, and then they can choose to deploy locally or onto Windows Azure in the cloud.
Because our job is to run an agile, efficient, secure and trustworthy central service through our worldwide datacentres, it means that the developers don’t need to worry about building and managing virtual machines, patching operating systems, and designing their own redundancy system. That’s the Azure team’s job.
The Windows Azure Platform also includes AppFabric, which is an add-on to allow you to integrate your on-premise and cloud infrastructure, with access control and service interoperability
It is based on a pay-as-you-go subscription, calculated on the volume of data/workload that’s used. In a sense it is very similar to a normal utility, like gas and electricity – you use as much as you want, and pay for what you use. And just like the electricity company, it’s our job to make sure the capacity is there when you want to use it. It also allows you to convert capital expenditure into resource expenditure – because you aren’t buying big fixed capital infrastructure – just simply renting the capacity you need, when you need it.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsazure/
This provides hosted versions of applications – like Exchange, SharePoint, Live Meeting (for web conferencing) and Office Communications (for instant collaboration) . So instead of installing your own infrastructure, you subscribe to the BPOS services you need, either as standard configurations, or as a dedicated services with your own dedicated architecture. It’s especially good for education, as it means that users can access information from virtually anywhere, whether on our off campus.
One of the benefits of using a cloud service for something like SharePoint is that you can then focus your IT resources on adding value to business-critical projects, rather than on running utility services.
By making it a cloud-based, subscription service, it is easier for you to provide the right subset of resources for the right users – choosing both the users and the services, and then not having to worry about the deployment and maintenance costs.
You simply license the users for the applications you want – on a per-user, per-month basis. There’s no additional device licences required, or any usage costs. It’s just a flat-fee monthly subscription. To reduce the monthly cost, you can roll this under your existing Volume Licence agreement
http://www.microsoft.com/online/en-gb/default.mspx
And yes, there’s a free trial (available on the link above)
This is a cloud-based customer relationship management service that can be accessed through Outlook or an Internet browser, and has rich integration with Office applications – Word, Excel and Communicator. It’s a comprehensive service which includes marketing automation, sales force automation, and customer service and support capabilities, as well as integrated workflow and business intelligence. In education, this is most likely to be valuable to independent schools, colleges and universities.
The beauty of this cloud service is that you can start a deployment in a small way, without having to build your own infrastructure, and then grow it as you need to. The cloud system is built on the same code as the on-premise system, so you can move between deployment options in the future.
It will be a per-user, per-month subscription, but unfortunately the online version of Dynamics isn’t available in the UK yet – currently it’s only in North America. But it should be crossing the Atlantic this autumn.
http://www.microsoft.com/online/dynamics-crm-online.mspx
This is a set of resources, products, and management tools that allows you to run your own private cloud (or contract another organisation to do it for you), using the best practice techniques that we have developed for our cloud infrastructure. It enables you to dynamically pool, allocate, and manage resources to deliver flexible/agile Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Capabilities like self-service portals let your end-users rapidly consume IT services by self-provisioning (and decommissioning) infrastructure on a shared server fabric, virtualised by Windows Server Hyper-V and managed by System Center. Departments are thus able to deploy their applications with a lot more speed and agility. This allows your own IT team to focus their time on solving business problems rather than worrying about keeping the basic infrastructure running. It provides a less complex, more agile and more efficient infrastructure, in-house. And there’s also a hybrid model, where you contract a service hoster to provider a ‘virtual private cloud’, perhaps as a top-up to your in-house infrastructure.
Well, because it is based on a set of best practice advice, you’ll find that the key components are being built into the products you already have – like Windows Server 2008 and Hyper-V – and the Systems Management Server products. And in addition, we’re releasing free toolkits – like the Dynamic Infrastructure Toolkit for System Center and the Dynamic Data Centre Toolkit for Hosters.
http://www.microsoft.com/virtualization/en/us/private-cloud.aspx
The Office Web Apps are online companions for Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote. Office Web Apps provide quick viewing of Office documents and basic editing capabilities. There are two methods of accessing Office Web Apps.
Individuals can access it on Windows Live using their Windows Live ID. For institutional use, every licence for Office 2010 under a volume licence scheme (such as a Select licence) includes an additional licence for Office Web Apps.
http://www.microsoft.com/office/2010/en/office-web-apps/default.aspx
This is a fully hosted service for managing the inbound and outbound flow of e-mail, through e-mail gateways with multiple filters that provide organizations with a defence against e-mail-borne malware, including spam, viruses, phishing scams, and e-mail policy violations. In addition, the service has a Web-based administrative console for writing rules to help enforce your organisation policies governing e-mail usage (eg limiting which domains users can send/receive email from etc)
You would normally buy it through your existing volume licence agreement, on a per-user or per-device basis.
http://www.microsoft.com/online/exchange-hosted-services/filtering.mspx
This is a new future cloud service for managing Windows PCs over the web, announced on 19th April with a limited beta programme. It allows you to use a single web-based console, with tools for updates, malware protection, troubleshooting, remote assistance, security policy configuration and desktop virtualisation. The aim is to simplify PC management and improve the end-user experience. It also includes the upgrade licences for Windows 7 Enterprise, anti-virus and other management tools for the workstations that are covered.
At the moment this isn’t available in the UK, but we have confirmed that the service will be available within a year of the beta programme. It is mainly designed for smaller networks, so may only have limited use within universities on the main campus, but it may be an option for remote ad-hoc infrastructure.
You will pay per-device, per-month, and it can be purchased individually, or as part of your existing volume licence agreement.
www.windowsintune.com
We have been developing Office 2010 for quite a while now – and many of you have been taking part in that by running the beta versions (at the last count, 7.5 million people have downloaded the beta version).
Late on Friday, Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 reached their last stage in the development process – called Release To Manufacturing (RTM in geek-speak). That means that it is finished and ready to go, and the code is then released to be made into the final product – whether that’s creating the DVDs that you buy in a shop, or creating the download websites for our volume licence customers.
Making the physical disks takes a little longer than the download sites, so here are the dates when you will be able to get hold of Office 2010:
If you’ve missed it, here’s a brief overview of what’s new in Office 2010.