Announcement: Back to school with Microsoft Classroom and School Data Sync

[Lana O'Brien]

It’s back-to-school time in the U.S. and many other countries, and we’re excited to invite you to the Microsoft Classroom Preview and the School Data Sync (SDS) Preview. IT admins can visit the preview instructions right now or (for a limited time) sign up to receive free one-on-one help directly from Microsoft.

Back in April, we announced new experiences for education and we’ve been humbled by the enthusiastic response. Teachers have used Microsoft Classroom and OneNote Class Notebooks to spark student creativity and enable more productive, collaborative classrooms. Schools and partners around the world have jumped on board to use School Data Sync, the easiest way to provision online classrooms in Office 365 Education.

Read more on Office Blogs. 

[#2]

I'm not sure whether to start this as a new discussion or to post this as a reply.

I'm currently looking at SDS with the 6 CSV files and I have some questions.

• How does SDS work with rollover to the next year? Should I include a year component with "Section" and rerun SDS at the beginning of each academic year? Every new year, I would add sections with new SIS IDs and link the students to those. That would make the most sense to me.
• When I rerun SDS at the beginning of the next year, can I omit the values used the previous year and simply add new values with unique ID's?
• How would one go about Archiving the previous year's information? For example, a teacher and learner should only see the current year's classes, however, the previous year's classes should still be available for access when needed.

[#3]

Ok, I went and read a bit more (How to deploy School Data Sync by using CSV files)- should have done that in the first place - and some of my questions have been answered as to how the syncing works. In short - the information should be kept current and class (group) membership will be added or removed but the classes (groups) remain. That takes care of the archiving. Furthermore, it would seem to me to be the right approach to include the year and grade in the section name, since that becomes a class (group). E.g. 2016 Math Gr6

[#4]

Having read the provided information, I'm still not sure concerning the following point. I have added some users (learners and teachers) manually before using SDS. I have also created some classes manually. How do I go about it now? Probably a 2-step process. Do I first add the others that have not been added via "Create new users" (omitting the current users from the CSV files)? Then add those who already are users to my CSV files (with those who were just added) and select "Sync existing users"? It is probably that.