Introducing Simpler Sign-on: a way to sign in to Office 365 with your Google account
A new step in bringing Microsoft tools to Google schools We’re excited to announce Customer Preview of simpler sign-on from G Suite to Office 365! Many G Suite for Education customers have told us that they’d like to use Office 365, but their students have trouble remembering two sets of passwords. With this new solution, they won’t have to, because they can just sign in to Office 365 using their Google credentials, and work side by side in Google Classroom and their Office apps! We’re at the beginning of an exciting new journey to bring Office 365 to Google school districts. We’re starting by rolling out support in the United States for two of our most popular Education experiences – OneNote and Immersive Reader. These will run on Chromebooks in certain tech configurations. OneNote is a digital binder that makes it easier to store and share all your class materials, and Immersive Reader in OneNote is a powerful feature that’s proven to help students with reading differences improve their skills and comprehension. If you’re a G Suite for Education user, we hope these tools can help you achieve better student outcomes in your district. And we need your help. Please sign up to join the waitlist, and tell your IT admin to sign up too. Then try us out and let us know what you think. How it works We know that every minute of classroom instruction is precious, and we’ve heard that your students lose precious minutes trying to sign in to apps and devices. So, we've built a new solution that we affectionally call "simpler sign-on", featuring a tailor-made version of our popular Office Online extension for the Chrome browser. With simpler sign-on, once you sign in to your school’s Chromebook, you can be automatically signed in to Office 365 in just two clicks, without retyping a username or password. And there’s no need for you or your students to do any special configuration, because your IT admin can set it all up for you. We’ll even help them get going for free! Store and share class materials with OneNote and Class Notebooks Google Classroom is popular with teachers, and we’re here to make it even better with OneNote Online, our powerful digital notebook. With OneNote Online, your students can enjoy freeform notes and class materials that include text, photos, audio, links, embedded content, and more. OneNote Online even has an easy-to-use equation editor, equation solver, and graphing calculator. To learn the basics of OneNote Online, visit this support page. OneNote Class Notebooks raise the bar even higher with a Content Library for handouts, a personal workspace for every student, and a Collaboration Space for lessons and creative activities. They’re a great way to store a whole “binder” of class materials all in one place, especially when you link to them from Google Classroom. There are also pre-built Class Notebooks that deliver content, such as: Code.org Notebook Open Up Resources Math Open Up Resources English Language Arts Mystery Skype Class Notebook To save time, you can connect a OneNote Class Notebook directly to your Google Classroom and import your Classroom course roster. You’ll be able to create and distribute assignments in OneNote and push the grades back to Classroom, so you can view all your assignments and grades in one place. To watch a quick interactive video on how to use a OneNote Class Notebook, check out this short, interactive course on the Microsoft Educator Community. Improve reading comprehension With Microsoft Immersive Reader, you can empower students to independently improve their reading and writing skills. Immersive Reader is a free tool that offers text and math decoding solutions for students with learning differences such as dyslexia and dysgraphia. Its features include Read Aloud, Picture Dictionary, Line focus, breaking words into syllables, and color-coded parts of speech. Immersive Reader also increases fluency for English language learners or readers of other languages with real-time translation, and because it’s built into OneNote Online, it works great on Chromebooks. If you store your course materials as OneNote pages, you can empower your students with learning differences to read texts in the way that best supports their learning. Interested in trying simpler sign-on? We can’t wait for you to try our tools, and we look forward to your feedback so we can learn where to improve. Please sign up to join the waitlist at https://aka.ms/OfficeEduForYou and tell your IT admin to sign up, too. We’ll provide them with free guidance to help them evaluate if simpler sign-on is a good fit for your district. And if it is, we’ll help them set it up, for free!New School Data Sync Experience is Now Generally Available
We are excited to announce the new School Data Sync (SDS) experience is now generally available. School Data Sync (SDS) is a free service for Education that helps to automate the process of synchronizing user and roster data from Student Information or Management Systems (SIS/SMS) with Microsoft 365. SDS has various enhancements and improvements over SDS (Classic).
Teachers of multiple schools
Within our MAT we have a number of schools each with their own MIS/SIS. For teachers that teach across more than one school, they'll therefore have more than one MIS/SIS staff record and hence more than one MIS/SIS ID. To prevent that staff member from having more than one AD User object (we have a single domain in a single forest for all schools) I set the SamAccountName within the MIS/SIS record for that staff member, and our custom PowerShell provisioning script tests for the presence of that username and if it exists knows not to create another AD user. This local AD domain for all schools is then synced to our Office 365 Education tenant via Azure AD Connect. Knowing that School Data Sync requires the ID field of the student.csv and teacher.csv files to be unique, when I export the data from each school I add a suffix (via PowerShell) to the ID to ensure uniqueness. For example, let's say I have a staff member who teaches in two schools, on one MIS their ID is 24, on another MIS their ID is 35, my teacher.csv might look like this: ID,School DfE Number,Username School1_24,1001,FJones School2_35,1002,Fjones Is this a supported configuration? That is, can an Azure AD User object be matched against multiple SDS sources or must it be a one to one mapping, i.e. Can the Azure AD user target with the Mail Alias of FJones be matched to both School1_24 and School2_35 teacher SDS identities? If an Azure AD User object can only be matched against a single SDS teacher ID, can I have multiple rows per staff definition, for example, if I post-process the school MIS outputs and consolidate the MIS/SIS IDs, is this a valid teacher.csv; ID,School DfE Number,Username MAT_FJones,1001,FJones MAT_FJones,1002,Fjones I've tried a number of combinations but keep coming up with sync errors, and before I get deeper into how SDS is architected (Administrative Units appears to be part of the answer), I thought it might save myself some time if I checked on what is or isn't actually supported. Many thanks SimonAnnouncement: School Data Sync Preview!
New on Office Blogs today: 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. School Data Sync (SDS) helps schools automatically create online classes used by Microsoft Classroom. It also helps Student Information System (SIS) and app partners to integrate with each other so they can build richer learning experiences for the classroom. SDS supports importing CSV files—so it supports virtually every SIS in the market. School IT admins: Get the preview for Microsoft Classroom and SDS. Deploy SDS yourself using these instructions, or For a limited time, sign up to request free one-on-one help directly from Microsoft. Give us feedback on our support site. View partners on the School Data Sync website.Announcing School Data Sync General Availability!
Hello Everyone, and welcome to the new Microsoft Tech Community focused on Microsoft School Data Sync. We are excited to announce that School Data Sync (SDS), our online classroom automation solution, is moving from preview to general availability! SDS helps schools save time and money by automatically creating online classrooms in Office 365 from their Student Information System (SIS or MIS). For more information, or to sign up for free deployment support for a limited time, please http://aka.ms/sdsga This tech community is a place for peers to share ideas, ask questions, offer suggestions, and provide community support. Microsoft folks will check in to make sure things are running smoothly. Now that hundreds of customers in over 20 countries have already used SDS to sync over 100,000 teachers and 2 million students, I hope this will become a popular gathering spot for school IT admins who use School Data Sync. Thank you, Matt McGinnis Microsoft School Data Sync Product Manager
HiddenGroupMembershipEnabled - SDS setting?
I have a customer who syncs groups to 365 via a CSV import to SDS. Student groups have the HiddenGroupMembershipEnabled attribute set as true. I'm aware that this attribute cannot be edited and to disable this feature, the group would need to be re-created. Is anyone aware of any setting or configuration in SDS that is automatically setting this attribute on student groups? If there is such a setting, can this be changed? Many thanks for your help. Anthony
