Announcement: Back to school with Microsoft Classroom and School Data Sync
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.Golden Path for Education - Part 1a
What is Golden Path Golden Path was developed to simplify and enhance the security of deploying a Microsoft 365 tenant solution in education. It consists of three stages: Stage 1: Deployment Guides are available online at Golden Path. This stage includes: Baseline - Stage 1a Standard - Stage 1b Advanced - Stage 1c Stage 2: A Discovery/Assessment AI tool is used to expose the tenant's configuration and analyze it against the tenant's license configurations, tenant and service settings, Microsoft's general education recommendations, and customer requirements. Stage 3: Drift Configuration management helps understand changes made against the established configuration in the tenant. These changes can be reversed or modified before any breaches or irregularities create problems. Goals and Objectives for Golden Path Goals Develop prescriptive deployment guides that provide a centralized resource with education-specific scenarios to assist organizations in defining, managing, and organizing their tenant and appropriate applications. Reduce the overall complexity of tenant and service deployment. Establish baseline recommended pathways to facilitate a common and agreed-upon configuration based on subject-matter experts. Utilize AI technology to uncover and compare recommended settings against user requirements based on documented configurations. Implement phased configurations to aid customers and partners in understanding what they may not know or should consider during discovery to meet customer expectations. Highlight unused features and products to ensure customers fully leverage the potential and benefits of their purchased product licenses. Identify opportunities for partner participation in achieving customer goals and expectations based on customer requirements and Golden Path findings. Create an easy pathway for customer change management to enhance control, security, compliance, and privacy of tenants. Develop custom assessments to evaluate product entry for items such as Copilot, Defender, Purview, Intune, Zero-Trust, and Microsoft Entra ID. Objectives Deliver information for features available (used/unused) to users based on license model. Prescriptive recommendations based on education scenarios. - Present upgrade license opportunities from A1 to A3 to A5. Security analysis exposing gaps and issues proactively to allow modifications before it's too late. Promote partner access to customers that have defined gaps based on assessments and are requesting partner assistance. Better discovery and assessment analysis with new tools. Designed to be more self-serving customer and partner access management. Speed up user adoption for educators and IT Admins alike. Baseline Stage 1a Baseline is stage 1a in the overall development of the Golden Path for Education. It is based on a majority of licenses within the tenant at the Microsoft 365 A1 for Education level. It also is a set of recommendations for ALL Microsoft Education tenants. Navigation Golden Path has three folders in the navigations. Golden Path Baseline References Golden Path folder consist of the Golden Path overall review. It goes over the entire program and the how and why it is built. Currently there are two pages, Golden Path overview and Baseline Overview. Golden Path overview menu Golden Path overview Stages (Deployment Guides, Discovery/Assessments, Drift Management) Modules (Setup, Identity, Applications, Security, and Devices) Phases (Baseline(A1), Standard(A3), Advanced(A5)) Baseline Overview Steps for each phase (Setup, Identity, Applications, Security, Devices) Licenses that are included General information links List of links for all applications and products included with A1 license List of links for all features included with A1 license Baseline menu Setup Tenant setup is key to establishing a secure and valid tenant. Setup goes through domain assignment, administration, and service management. Overview - Review all the steps that are part of the setup phase section Step 1 - Create your Office 365 tenant account Step 2 - Configure Security Center admin settings Step 3 - Secure and configure your network Step 4 - Sync your on-premises active directory Step 5 - Provision users Step 6 - Sync SIS with School Data Sync (SDS) Step 7 - License Users Identity Establishing an identity via Microsoft Entra ID and establishing authentication methods, Single Sign-On, and user procurement methodologies. Overview - Review all steps that are a part of the identity phase Step 1 - Understand identity definitions Step 2 - Configure Microsoft Entra ID basics Step 3 - Consider education identity steps Step 4 - Consider identity applications Step 5 - Set up access to operation services Step 6 - Set up identity lifecycle Step 7 - Configure security in identity Step 8 - Manage access controls Applications Applications like Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange Online are the core to a Microsoft tenant. Getting these applications setup are essential to allowing users in education to access services and apps like Learning Accelerators. Overview - Review all steps that are a part of the application phase Exchange Online o Step 1 - Design an Exchange Online environment o Step 2 - Set up Exchange Online o Step 3 - Configure compliance and security in Exchange Online o Step 4 - Configure address books, shared mailboxes, and clients Microsoft Teams o Overview - What is Microsoft Teams for Education o Step 1 - Configure Microsoft Teams for Education o Step 2 - Configure Microsoft Teams policies and settings for education organization OneDrive/SharePoint - Overview o Step 1 - Plan your OneDrive and SharePoint Deployment o Step 2 - Share within OneDrive and SharePoint o Step 3 - Configure security and access controls in OneDrive and SharePoint o Step 4 - Compliance considerations with OneDrive and SharePoint Security and Compliance Security via each phase is essential to maintaining order and blocking access for bad actors. Along with security compliance/privacy considerations that are established to adhere to a multitude of local and government requirements worldwide. Overview Step 1 - Security Considerations Devices Managed and unmanaged devices are another key to helping secure the network and potential cyber-security considerations that enter the network via these devices. Overview Step 1 - Review device management structure Step 2 - Plan device management Step 3 - Configure settings and applications Step 4 - Deploy and manage devices Windows 11 features and tips References menu Mulit-tenant solutions - Architectural recommendations base on multi or large tenant solutions. Accessibility Deploy Office 365 applications Pooled storage management How do you use Golden Path? Golden Path uses deployment guidelines content that contain education scenario specifics. Golden Path has a linked path for each modules based on the phase (Baseline,Standard,Advanced). Users can follow the deployment content to establish or redefine the tenant configuration in order to enable additional services and products. What’s Next Go to https://aka.ms/gp4edu to access the first part of Golden Path. Part 1b (Standard -A3 content) NEXT Part 1c (Advanced – A5 content) Part 2 - We will create a mechanism to discover the tenant configuration settings and allow customers and partners the ability to qualify what is set to standard recommendation. Using AI to deliver user requirements against the configuration will allow additional paths to enable services and features that allow the user/customer to achieve their objectives. Part 3 – Deliver drift management solution for management of unrealized or understood changes that need to be approved or modified.
Azure AD Group Based Licensing in Education. Will this apply to Staff, Students and Alumni?
Please note that I have previously posted this as a ‘reply’ to the announcement of the feature https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/Azure-Active-Directory/Azure-AD-group-based-license-management-for-Office-365-and-more/m-p/57595#M304 - I apologize if this is some sort of cross posting breach. Greetings all, My question is specifically in regards to end user licensing in the Education Sector, which is needed to use Azure AD Group Based Licensing. Going by Source 1, all users who inherit a license via the group based licensing model will need an Azure AD Basic license (not Azure AD Free). Going by Source 2, this will change once the functionality reaches GA. Once this happens, "it will be included in Office 365 Enterprise E3 and similar products." As Education licensing differs from the standard Enterprise E3, will this functionality be included at no cost for Student and Alumni licensing? As you can imagine, a large University will have hundreds of thousands of Alumni and tens of thousands of Students. Having Education E3 include the Azure AD Basic licensing / eligibility for Azure AD Group based licensing for $0 will help for Staff, but if Azure AD Basic licensing is not included for Alumni and Students, the Education sector will not be able to afford to use this awesome functionality. Can someone please provide clarity, and preferably a link to a valid Microsoft site, on how Azure AD Group Based Licensing and Azure AD Basic will apply to Staff, Students and Alumni. Source 1 - Link - https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/active-directory/active-directory-licensing-whatis-azure-portal Features – During public preview, a paid or trial subscription for Azure AD basic or premium editions is required in the tenant to use group-based license management. Also, every user who inherits any licenses from groups must have the paid Azure AD edition license assigned to them. Source 2 - Link - https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/enterprisemobility/2017/02/22/announcing-the-public-preview-of-azure-ad-group-based-license-management-for-office-365-and-more/%C2%A0 It contains the following statement: "While group-based license management is in public preview you will need an active subscription for Azure AD Basic (or above) in your tenant to assign licenses to groups. If you don’t have one, just sign up for an Enterprise Mobility + Security trial. Later, when this functionality becomes generally available it will be included in Office 365 Enterprise E3 and similar products."How to test drive Microsoft Classroom and SDS as a partner?
I got word from our Dutch Microsoft representative that Microsoft Classroom and School Data Sync are available in preview. These two solutions only work in O365 EDU tenants. So I first tried a demo tenant from https://demo.microsoft.com and I tried to set up a trial but with both the environments I got a message that I could not use it with that tenant (when trying to sign up for a preview using instructions that I obtained from https://support.office.com/en-us/article/Add-Microsoft-Classroom-Preview-and-School-Data-Sync-Preview-to-your-Office-365-Education-subscription-04df0f05-e91f-49cb-88ee-17a247ede5a7?ui=en-US&rs=en-US&ad=US Can someone point me to how I, as a partner, can try the product setup for these new features?AI-powered Teach Module in M365 now rolled out to all educators!
Here is an end-to-end tutorial video on the new AI-powered "Teach" module in M365 Copilot. This is available today for ALL Microsoft 365 educators globally! Includes: 📘 Lesson plans 📊 Rubrics 📝 Quizzes 🌍 Standards grounding (35 countries) 🎯 Learning Activities ➕ Lots more YouTube 📺 https://youtu.be/WkXVukl62KU?si=UT3FzN5fqXQ7KlBdUser adoption podcast for education
Hi Everyone, Just wanted to make you aware of some community resources we have created to help education users adopt Office 365 from a strategic level. We also create guides on our blog and YouTube channel for end users. YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCi3gSRmDtbEE4ozmqykAa2w We have a podcast series on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-eZHO0ywIIBIDOpcTkWFFb-8N7JEx_TO Also a community blog area on our website: https://www.clouddesignbox.co.uk/blog Any my own personal blog: https://www.tonyishere.co.uk/ I hope its of use to you, you can also reach out to me on Twitter https://twitter.com/TonyMSTeams Thanks, TonySigning up for Preview of Microsoft Teams with classroom experiences
I have read the announcement about the new classroom experiences with Microsoft Teams which will replace Microsoft Classroom. I have also read that it will be available in the 3rd Quarter of 2017. We currently have access to the 'normal' Microsoft Teams. What I would like to know, is it possible to sign up somewhere to start testing Microsoft Teams with Classroom experiences?
