Live@edu Upgrade to Office 365 for education
If you’re a Live@edu customer you might be wondering to yourself where you can find out more information about the upgrade to Office 365 for education.
- What do I need to plan for?
- When can I do it?
- How long does it take?
- What about SSO, ILM, PCNS, etc.?
These are just some of the questions I bet you’re asking and if you didn’t know, there is a place that holds the answers!
The upgrade wiki on the Office 365 community (which is also a great place to go for other Office 365 related info) covers lots of useful topics and is packed full of information about the upgrade, which is split into 3 stages:
Stage 1: Upgrade domains
During this stage, we prepare your space in Office 365. Everything happens in the background—end users don't see any changes. There are a few tasks administrators can't do like adding or removing domains.
Stage 2: Upgrade users
During this stage, we switch all users to the Office 365 version of Exchange Online. This doesn't require moving mailboxes, message delivery is uninterrupted, and access to SkyDrive, Messenger, and other Windows Live services is not impacted.
Part way through this stage, all users will not be able to access email until the automated process is finished and the administrator assigns them a new temporary password.
While this stage is in process, administrators can’t add, delete, or modify users.
Stage 3: Set a password for your Office 365 admin account
This step requires you to set a temporary password for your Office 365 administrator account, which you will be required to change upon first time sign in to Office 365. After you submit your password, your upgrade is finalized and you will no longer manage your institution from Service Management Portal.
The length of the upgrade is dependent on the size of your institution.
- The automated upgrade may take as little as one day for small schools. For a school with 5,000 accounts, an email outage of 1 hour is expected.
- For a school with 50,000 accounts, it typically takes three to five days for the whole process, with an email outage of less than five hours.
Upgrading to Office 365 for education as soon as possible will give your users access to the latest and greatest services we have to offer, including Exchange Online with a 25GB inbox, SharePoint Online with the Office Web Apps and Lync Online for instant messaging, sharing and communication. Don’t forget that the A2 plan is free for both staff and students!
So head across to the Wiki and start reading up today!