Essex County Council has just completed the rollout of Live@Edu to 487 schools. This was a large and complex project involving the migration of accounts and mailboxes from a third-party hosted Exchange 2007 environment to the new Microsoft cloud email service. Mark Reynolds, School Business Manager for the south spoke to Gordon Kerr and Rob Rainey from Essex, to find out how it went.
Gordon explains how they went about it:
“6 of the 487 Schools were Secondary, but the majority were Primary Schools who previously used our ESCI environment for staff email. Rather than just starting again, we made a commitment not only to set schools up on the free service, but also to transfer their existing mail, contacts and calendar. We exported from Exchange 2007 to pst's and then used a third party tool (Full Armour) to transfer the mailbox data into Live@Edu. We used PowerShell to provision all the domains and everyone kept their existing email addresses. With this number of schools, we could not send someone to all of the schools to handle the local re-configurations and the schools often don’t have any technical staff in-house.”
During the project, they experienced significant challenges with the sheer range of different technology being used by their schools. In particular, they found many schools were still running IE6 and therefore found themselves having to support schools with a range of issues that were not specifically related to email. There were also large numbers of schools who wanted to use the full Outlook client rather than the web client (OWA) so Essex recommended they upgrade to either 2007 or 2010. A lot of these challenges were dealt with by a network of local support providers in Essex, who Rob decided early on would be key to a successful project:
“We held an IT support evening for local IT providers and invited the engineers along for a series of training sessions and workshops. First we showed them what schools would be getting, then explained the migration process and also discussed how to support them after the migration. Our initial pilot was run in October with 10 schools and we then did our first big batch in December to test the process. When these 60 migrations were complete and we’d learnt a lot about the technology and our processes, we could plan the rest into phases between January and March.”
As well as doing a lot of the technical work, Rob also found time to write some extremely good end-user guides, which were “98% visual”. They were geared at local school administrators, who would often not be IT people. The guides were all made available on the County website and included in the welcome packs that were emailed to schools before their migration.
We then asked Gordon what the schools think of their new email service:
“They like the familiar Outlook interface, they like the large mailboxes, and the fact that Shared Calendars are supported in the 2010 OWA interface is a massive bonus for them - as OWA 2007 didn't support that. Many schools have started off by giving Live@Edu to staff first, but are starting to move pupils on also. Lastly, schools really like that it worked with their iPhones and Android phones really easily.
It was a big project and bound not to be completely smooth, but we got through our hiccups, working across multiple organisations - with a big dollop of Microsoft help. Overall it has been a big success, and has been done within the timescales.”
Lastly, we asked one of the Essex schools about their experience so far. Neil Finbow (ICT Strategic Lead Officer for Children’s Support Services) told us:
“As a practitioner I found the whole move to Live@Edu quite smooth and easy. The help.outlook.com help pages are comprehensive and very user-friendly. There were a few times that I had to delve into the internet for more answers and pointers to take me where we wanted to be, but on the whole the migration and setting up of 300+ staff was quite easy and with very few teething problems. I must, however, add that a certain amount of prior knowledge of exchange server was a great help to me. I now look forward to adding our students”.
So thanks to the hard work of Gordon and Rob and the Schools Broadband/ESCI Team, 487 schools in Essex are now benefitting from free Microsoft cloud services and have been empowered to do more with less. If you have not yet discovered Live@Edu, you can read all about it and sign yourself up for a test domain here.
I would like to add an interesting post written by Mike Lloyd,our world wide education industry solutions specialist that i think you too will also find very informative.
Cloud Watching #1 – Cloud 101
AppFabric, Azure, Bing Maps, BPOS, Cloud, Cost, CRM, Exchange, IaaS, Interoperability, Live@Edu, Migration, New South Wales, PaaS, Relevance, SaaS, Scale, Seasonality, System Center
This article is the first in a series on Cloud computing, and focuses on the basics – the “what, why and how” of Cloud computing as it relates to Schooling.
INTRODUCTION
When New South Wales Department of Education and Training (DET), the largest School District in the Southern Hemisphere, wanted to put an annual Science Standard Attainment test online they faced a simple choice – $200,000 for server infrastructure or $500 to use a Cloud computing service from Microsoft. Watch the video here to find out what the NSW DET gained from their implementation: http://vimeo.com/18637271
WHY CLOUD?
We don’t normally expect a schooling system to generate its own electricity. There’s no building with a bank of generators, no “Manager of Electrical Generation”, leading a team of technicians. But we have expected our schooling systems to be experts at running their own “IT Power Stations”, generating their own utility service.
So why not provide computing power in the same way as electricity? “Cloud-based” IT services can be “generated” remotely by a factory-size bank of powerful computers (“servers”) and delivered over the internet to subscribing consumers who can take as much, or as little as they need.
Cloud computing changes the game of delivering schooling services by addressing the following challenges:
The Scale Challenge
Schooling has scaling issues like no other service. With 1.2bn learners, 55m teachers, and 4.3m institutions, schooling represents one of the biggest single human enterprises on the planet. Providing cost effective learning services to entire populations is one of the opportunities that Cloud computing potentially addresses.
The Cost and Seasonality Challenge
Students are typically only in their physical school environment for 15% of the year. Schooling services undergo huge peaks and troughs, on daily, weekly, monthly and annual basis. When schooling systems run their own IT services, they have to pay for these whether they are being used or not.
Currency, Relevance and Interoperability
The next problem that schooling systems face is the rate of progress and change in IT. Choices usually come down to either to systems stagnating and providing out of date services, or enormous cost just to keep pace with change. Technology is advancing so fast that a student leaving a secondary school is likely to be comfortably using technology that did not exist when they started.
BUSINESS MODELS
Cloud computing addresses these issues through three main kinds of business models:
Software as a Service (SaaS)
Subscription based or free Cloud application services deliver Software as a Service (SaaS) over the Internet, eliminating the need to install and run the application on the customer’s own computers, and simplifying maintenance and support. Activities are managed from central locations rather than at each customer’s site, enabling customers to access applications remotely via the Web. Click here for more details, or here for architectural guidance.
Microsoft SaaS offers include:
Live@Edu - insitutions can use their own domain names to provide students with a complete “consumer” set of e-mail, collaboration and storage services. Live@Edu will be superceded by Office 365 for Education
Microsoft Business Productivity Online Suite delivers a suite of services for hosted communication and collaboration.
Microsoft Exchange Hosted Services - filtering, archiving, encryption, and continuity.
Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online, student relationship management, automate workflows and centralized information.
Windows Live – worldwide there are 500 million Windows Live users using a package of comms, collab and storage services
Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)
With “Infrastructure as a Service” (IaaS), customers get on-demand computing and storage to host, scale, and manage applications and services. IaaS delivers computer infrastructure – typically a platform virtualization environment – as a service. Rather than purchasing servers, software, data-centre space and network equipment, customers buy those resources as fully outsourced services. Suppliers typically bill such services based on a utility computing basis and amount of resources consumed - therefore the cost will typically reflect the level of activity. Click here for more details.
Microsoft IaaS offers include the following Datacentre tools for in-house or external service provision:
System Center - dynamically pool, allocate, and manage virtualized resources
Windows Server – provides a foundation for data centre services, including web-apps, power management, and server and desktop virtualization between on-premises, private cloud, and public cloud computing
Dynamic Data Center Toolkit for Hosters allows you to create a private or public cloud offering, including services for provisioning and managing servers
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
“Platform as a Service” (PaaS) delivers a computing platform and/or solution stack as a service. PaaS facilitates deployment of applications without the cost and complexity of buying and managing the underlying hardware and software layers. Typically, customers (such as NSW DET) will rent a set amount of capacity for specific periods of time, and turn their applications on or off and scale according to demand. They will only get billed for the time and capacity consumed. Delivering an annual test online for example, becomes significantly more cost effective through PaaS than through other means. Click here for more details.
Microsoft PaaS offers include the following:
Windows Azure platform is a version of Windows that runs in Microsoft datacentres. It includes SQL Azure (database) to enables applications and services to be run in the Cloud.
AppFabric provides a range of services including access control; connections between applications in the cloud; caching; integration; and APIs for developing and hosting an application on Azure
Bing Maps a complete set of geo-data services enabling functions such as visualisation of enrollment trends, or tracking assets such as buses.
Microsoft .NET - programming enironment for writing applications across a variety of devices, application types, and programming tasks.
ADVANTAGES OF CLOUD
Cloud offers a way to tackle the issues of cost, scale, change, currency, relevance and interoperability and flexibility of demand. In addition Cloud services, by their nature, tend to be designed for reach, and work across multiple open standard based devices. Cloud services are designed to run at internet scale supporting millions of users at prices of an order of magnitude lower than traditional solutions.
The cost of migrating between versions, or staying up-to-date is outsourced to the Cloud service provider. This also has the effect of removing capital expenditure (Capex) from IT provision and transferring to an operational expenditure (Opex) model that does not have the same associated peaks and troughs.
Cloud services are designed to be simple to deploy, provision and deprovision. Indeed when using platform as a service you only pay for the services you are using, while you are actually using them, which fits perfectly with education’s seasonality.
DISADVANTAGES OF CLOUD
With significant advantage comes a degree of disadvantage and risks, which should be carefully considered. These can be summarised as follows:
For a an excellent and unbiased guide outlining the advanatages and disadvantages of the Cloud, download - “The Benefits and Risks of Cloud Platforms: A Guide for Business Leaders“ by David Chappell.
MIGRATING TO THE CLOUD
Most on-premises applications will not have been built with Cloud architecture in mind, so the first set of decisions focus on what kind of of architecture you want. For example, a key consideration here is whether to use a multi-tenent model – ie a single instance of the software serving multiple client organizations.
There are several resources available to help with migrating to the Cloud including:
SKILLS FOR THE CLOUD
CONCLUSION
Live@Edu has 10s of millions of accounts, proving that Cloud models can deliver quality services at massive scale. Aside from New South Wales DET, many schooling and learning services organisations around the world are beginning to take advantage of Cloud computing – for example, The Kentucky Department of Education moved more than 800,000 peopl to Live@Edu – a move that will help them save more than $6.3 million over the next four years. Florida Virtual School saved $2 Million by switching to BPOS. Another interesting use of Cloud technology comes from Eduify – a small company providing research and writing assistance to students. Read the case study here.
MORE RESOURCES
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Thanks to Brad Tipp for his input.
David Chappell has some excellent Cloud resources on his blog and a great summary of Cloud Platforms
If you would like to read more from Mike, you can do so via here
The Office Platform Team released two new Microsoft Office 2010 Accessibility Add-ins on March 17th. While comparatively small add-ins, they enable big things! Try them yourself by downloading via the below links.
The Subtitling Add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint (STAMP)helps Microsoft PowerPoint 2010 users add closed captions to the video and audio files included in their presentations, which boosts their impact for those with hearing disabilities. This also enables video and audio in PowerPoint to be localized in different languages.
The DAISY Consortium, Save as DAISY for Office 2010 helps Microsoft Word users convert Word Open XML files to the Digital Accessible Information System (DAISY) format, which powers digital talking books and compatible software & braille readers for this with print disabilities. This version now supports Office 2003, 2007 and 2010.
To get a full picture of all the Office 2010 Accessibility features, you can do here
I spoke to Sir Mark Grundy, Executive Principal and Kirsty Tonks, Director of e-Leaning to get an understanding of the continuous development of the Learning Gateway and how changes and additions have had a positive impact.
One area that really interested me was the lesson planning bank that has been developed.
Before this system was implemented, teachers had to plan every lesson. They may have saved them on the gateway or kept them in their planners. Staff planning was difficult to see and even more importantly difficult to share. The downside of either paper based or individually stored planning is that only they knew the details of their upcoming lessons – not very useful if they were off sick for instance and cover teachers would not have the correct information to keep the learning in the subject consistent.
Kirsty talked to senior staff and everyone knew that a system was needed that would easily facilitate the tracking and monitoring of lesson planning and also be user friendly. They wanted staff to understand and adopt the new system quickly and become part of their everyday working life, so a ‘’step by step’’ template was created, meaning that all staff could easily pick up the system.
I asked Kirsty if other schools wanted to implement this idea to their own Learning Gateway, what best practices would they advise?
‘’We gave as much support as possible to make it as easy for staff to take on board the new system and process and planned carefully its introduction and implementation. The time frame was short - but tightly organised, so staff felt supported not “put upon”. There was training on how to complete the new Lesson plan format and the pedagogy behind the changes by Manny Kelay, Vice Principal for the Curriculum and it was presented very much as something that would save time and benefit all. The e-learning team trained staff how to use the meta-tagged Planning bank correctly when uploading lesson plans and there was also an online help guide how to do this if they needed help at home or out of school hours. There was also an exemplar lesson bank for staff to dip into and see best practice and then a regular monitoring system that reports to Senior leaders and Heads of Department set up which looked at the frequency and quality of submitted plans.We reviewed its impact termly and adapted where necessary.’’
‘’We gave as much support as possible to make it as easy for staff to take on board the new system and process and planned carefully its introduction and implementation. The time frame was short - but tightly organised, so staff felt supported not “put upon”. There was training on how to complete the new Lesson plan format and the pedagogy behind the changes by Manny Kelay, Vice Principal for the Curriculum and it was presented very much as something that would save time and benefit all.
The e-learning team trained staff how to use the meta-tagged Planning bank correctly when uploading lesson plans and there was also an online help guide how to do this if they needed help at home or out of school hours. There was also an exemplar lesson bank for staff to dip into and see best practice and then a regular monitoring system that reports to Senior leaders and Heads of Department set up which looked at the frequency and quality of submitted plans.We reviewed its impact termly and adapted where necessary.’’
The agreement to use the template immediately changed the way that staff planned lessons. In the first few months staff uploaded every lesson plan, but this only a temporary approach and after a few months they moved to a position where staff only upload one third of their plans.. They now upload one third of their lesson plans each week to a tagged document library. The ability for teachers to tag and filter the planning uploads means that lessons can be easily and quickly found by subject or teacher.
With this system of everyone uploading their planning to the Planning Bank has also meant that staff could look at other lesson plans across each subject enabling them to share ideas and techniques used in other lessons, opening up opportunity to make lessons more diverse and helps gain consistency of quality planning across the whole curriculum.
Before this system was implemented, teachers had to plan every lesson but they couldn't share them or really “build upon” them. This would not only take time, but not all teachers managed to get this done on a regular and consistent basis. With the planning bank, not only can lessons now be shared, but there is a sense of collective responsibility as their work is being recognized and helpful to their colleagues.
Mark Stewart, our very own Strategic Partner Manager in the Education team, recently had the opportunity to visit Parklands Primary School and join their event with Learning Possibilities Plus (LP+) to understand how they are making the most of their Learning Gateway. Here is his post.
It was with extreme pleasure that I was able to take the afternoon out on March 8th to go and participate in a primary school event sponsored by Learning Possibilities Plus (LP+), hosted by Parklands Primary School (Northamptonshire). In attendance were 50 or so teachers from nearby schools all keen to see how technology can be used in schools to improve student /teacher learning and engagement.
LP+ are a specialist education partner who developed a Hosted Learning Platform solution built on Microsoft SharePoint , addressing primary and secondary school learning and collaboration requirements.
I found it to be a great afternoon, hearing a number of teachers sharing some of the innovation they have introduced into their learning platforms and so I thought it would be great to share some highlights with the wider teachers out there and how to add compelling content and experiences to your SharePoint solution.
Voicethread - With VoiceThread, group conversations are collected and shared in one place. A VoiceThread is a collaborative, multimedia slide show that holds images, documents, and videos and allows people to navigate slides and leave comments in 5 ways - using voice (with a mic or telephone), text, audio file, or video (via a webcam). Share a VoiceThread with friends, students, and colleagues for them to record comments too. Users can doodle while commenting, use multiple identities, and pick which comments are shown through moderation. You can embed this application into your SharePoint using the “Content & PageViewer” Webparts.
UStream – With UStream you can download a tool that allows you to broadcast live streaming video from a camcorder or webcam to a PC. You can then embed these into your SharePoint using the Media Webpart. The ability to broadcast school or field trip events really made a big difference in the engagement with students and also the end result and ability to share those experiences in an innovative way.
PrimaryPad - PrimaryPad is a web-based text editor designed for schools that allows pupils and teachers to work together in real-time. Again this was integrated into SharePoint using WebParts. We could see how easy it was to extend the learning platform to include interesting, simple collaboration activities. PrimaryPad is clever in the way it tracks who is writing what, for example, showing who has contributed to a group assignment.
I enjoyed my time sharing ideas with teachers from around the area and hope to see more of these innovations around our Education Partner solutions in the future. I hope you find these useful and helpful in your classroom too.
Robin Chan, Voice TSP, UK Incubation at Microsoft Reading ran the Lync Education event on 4th March 2011 at Cardinal Place, London. Here is his summary of the event.
This event was the first we have run dedicated to Lync 2010 for the education segment and very well received and extremely popular. The event was oversubscribed, on the day we had 76 attendees with a mixture of people from universities, colleges, schools and local authorities.
The aim of the event was to drive awareness of Lync in general, how it can deliver significant cost savings, while improving productivity, collaboration and the enhancing teaching environment. A big focus for Lync is the delivery of Enterprise Voice, essentially the ability for Lync to be deployed as an full blown telephony solution, i.e. PBX replacement while also providing true unified communications.
The full agenda is available here, we started by discussing our vision of education and unified communications, followed by an overview of Lync. We had an series of very involving live demos which stepped through functionality available out of the box and how it could be applied in an education environment. We had session dedicated to the telephony functionality which pointed out the potential costs savings. We then had some excellent presentations from our customers talking about their experiences of deploying Lync:
· The Open University
· University of West of England
· Benenden School
We wrapped up the day by hosting an Expert Q&A
All the presentations are available here, for further information please visit http://www.lync.com
If you have any specific questions or would like to schedule an follow up meeting please contact your account manager or drop me an email Robin Chan
We have an large ecosystem of partners for Lync, below are a list of partners who have deployments of Lync/OCS with enterprise voice in the education segment:
Dell: Paul Merry - paul_merry@dell.com
Modality: James Rodd - james.rodd@modalitysystems.com
Dimension Data: Chris Clark - Chris.Clark@eu.didata.com
HP: Brian Fenix - Brian.Fenix@hp.com
When Southfield School for Girls created their learning platform to share information, they wanted to create a platform that would engage the parents and ensure that the learning platform would be a good source of information that parents wanted to know. In order to ensure the content met the requirements of the parents, the IT department of Southfield School decided to approach and consult the parents for feedback and idea’s, as Tracy O’Malley, Network Manager at Southfield school explains.
I’ve been a real advocate of our learning platform from the outset, although I sometimes have to work hard to foster the same degree of enthusiasm in some of my colleagues!
Like many schools, we were keen to use the platform to share information with our parents and so we decided the best way to approach this was to consult with our parents first. We are lucky enough to have a quite a few staff and governors that are parents too and so we started with our colleagues first, as we thought that it would be a good way to pilot ideas.
We also worked with Learning Possibilities, our learning platform provider on this pilot, as we wanted to try out MIS integration at the same time to provide online reporting to parents.
The feedback from the pilot made us realise that parental engagement is about much more than online reporting. Although parents definitely do want to see information about attendance, punctuality, homework and achievement - they are also keen to find out information about school trips, house points and extra-curricular activities. With the learning platform, it’s possible for us to have all of these things in one place. So, we have a separate site where parents have access to this information and also individual sites for things like the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and our school canteen – as parents like to know what food is available! We also have a site relating to our eco project; it’s a good opportunity to ask parents to save their plastic bottles for us to build an eco greenhouse!
The feedback from the pilot made us realise that parental engagement is about much more than online reporting. Although parents definitely do want to see information about attendance, punctuality, homework and achievement - they are also keen to find out information about school trips, house points and extra-curricular activities.
With the learning platform, it’s possible for us to have all of these things in one place. So, we have a separate site where parents have access to this information and also individual sites for things like the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award and our school canteen – as parents like to know what food is available!
We also have a site relating to our eco project; it’s a good opportunity to ask parents to save their plastic bottles for us to build an eco greenhouse!
Most parents like to know generally about subject areas – and so one thing we are trying out is ‘Faculty of the Month’ where one faculty per month showcases the work that it does. This gives parents the opportunity to view examples of students’ work. We encourage feedback from parents and so, as some parents don’t have the chance to regularly call into school, we set up a parental discussion. We also provide links to external websites that we think will be of interest to them. Soon, we intend to start using the e-portfolio for students to share their best work with parents, which we hope will improve the dialogue between children and parents even more!
Most parents like to know generally about subject areas – and so one thing we are trying out is ‘Faculty of the Month’ where one faculty per month showcases the work that it does. This gives parents the opportunity to view examples of students’ work.
We encourage feedback from parents and so, as some parents don’t have the chance to regularly call into school, we set up a parental discussion. We also provide links to external websites that we think will be of interest to them.
Soon, we intend to start using the e-portfolio for students to share their best work with parents, which we hope will improve the dialogue between children and parents even more!
I feel parental guidance in the creation of the learning platform not only gives a sense of involvement and understanding on all aspects of their child’s learning but enables them to take an active interest at a distance. Something I’m sure my parents would have liked to have the opportunity of when I was at school!
As England prepare for their match tomorrow against Ireland in the 6 Nations and, with any luck take on another win, I have spoken to Ron Lafferty, the IT Manager at Johnny Wilkinson’s old school; Lord Wandsworth College. Ron has just led the college through the deployment of Microsoft Windows 7 a move that has scored positive results and given them the ‘win’’ they were looking from a software upgrade.
Back in March 2010, the decision was made to deploy Windows 7 and Office 2010, a decision that as you will read, really paid off. With their school policy of not replacing any desktops that were less than four years old and laptops less than three, they were not sure if the machines they had would make the move easily and had to prepare for the possibility of having laptops, computers and printers that wouldn’t work, and reverting back to their old system.
As a test, all staff were asked to bring in one of every machine that they had, from RM and Viglen desktops, to Acer Laptops, to see if the deployment of Windows 7 would be a clear run or whether they would they come up against a defence that would make the deployment a struggle. With over 10 different types of hardware to find drivers for, this did seem a bit of a challenge especially with some manufactures advising that this would prove too difficult to complete and saying the deployment wouldn’t work.
Not to be defeated, Ron and his IT team went ahead for the ‘try’, and after running tests found that actually despite warnings from some, the test machines not only deployed to Windows 7 but did so in a straight forward manner. This doesn't go to say that the deployment didn’t go with the odd little hiccup along the way on the software front, but most legacy software worked well and as Ron describes, the staff were ‘’very pleased with the test result.’’
The decision to go for a ‘try’ moved Ron and his team forward for the full ‘conversion’ and deploy Windows 7 to all 405 computers in the college.
“There was no repeat of issues we had expected from past experiences when performing software upgrades. One previous rollout had wiped whole systems and we could not afford a repeat of that situation. The level of system support calls between October 2010 and January 2011 went down to next to nothing. With the old network, support calls had played a big part in the IT team’s life and now our customers, the teachers and students, are much happier with what we provide. The process to move over was a smooth as silk!”.
Ron found the rollout so “smooth” that they’ve recommended deploying Windows 7 to two other independent schools that are now planning their rollouts with the assistance of Microsoft partner Rivanet
So, not only have they taken on the tactics of deploying 10 test machines first before grappling with the overhaul of other machines, but they tackled opponents whose advise that this wouldn’t work and came out on top. For me, that shows a clear win.
As one of the top licensing resellers in the UK as well as an Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM), Viglen are well placed to understand the licensing needs of their customers.
A training course is now available at the University of Sussex to help customers understand how Microsoft licensing works and how you can get the best return on your investment.
With over 20 years experience of software licensing, Cheryl Lapham, Schools and Software Sales Manger at Viglen is regarded by many in the Education sector as one of the primary experts on Microsoft licensing in the UK.
If you would like to know more about Microsoft licencing, you can register for this free course here.
As more and more schools will be making the change and moving towards cloud technologies over the coming months, Microsoft want to ensure that our customers have the full support and any issues or queries during this transition.
Planning, implementing and obtaining the right skills to ensure that this change runs as smoothly as possible concerns some IT staff, so to iron out these concerns and queries, I caught up with Greg Pearson, UK Lead for Microsoft Learning to understand a little more about these issue’s and what Microsoft as a company are doing to help our customers during this change.
Q. What are the current issues that you see around technical skills and the move towards cloud technologies?
A. First of all, it is good news for IT professionals. Migration to cloud technologies will open up new opportunities and avenues for professional growth, but it will require action to take advantage of them. We will see a shift away from traditional skills as the simplification and automation of some processes will mean that only a basic level of knowledge will suffice. There will clearly be a new emphasis on emerging technologies e.g. Hyper-V and Office 365, but also a requirement for a broader set of skills around architecture, planning, design, security and management to help realise the benefits of cloud technology business cases and provide and cost analytics.
Whilst that may sound scary to some, my simple guidance would be:
1) Obtain and leverage core skills now – these are still essential and will be for 5+ years.
2) Enhance those core skills – develop key online technology skills within products like SharePoint and Exchange to help make the move towards cloud offerings
3) Develop new skills – technologies like Windows Azure and Virtualisation
Q. So what is Microsoft Learning doing to help our customers make this change?
A. We are building our portfolio of training and certification for cloud technologies now. Some of the core technology skills training is already available e.g. Virtualisation and Windows Server 2008. We have just launched our portal that helps map courses and certifications to various roles and functions - www.microsoft.com/learning/cloud.
Even better news for those in the Education sector is that we have the IT Academy programme that gives extremely low cost access to broad range of elearning, certifications, courseware and additional resources that can help you prepare. You can add IT Academy into your current software agreement or purchase it direct from Microsoft. The beauty of this programme is that the benefits are open to all staff as well as students, so it opens up the opportunity to enhance your ICT curriculum and build in the skills needed for the IT jobs of tomorrow, but that moves us into a separate topic of discussion.