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Microsoft 365 Education academic year transition

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Year-end close and back-to-school processes

Overview

Microsoft 365 Solutions for Education empower education professionals to unlock creativity, promote teamwork, and provide a safe experience for everyone in a comprehensive and affordable cloud offering.

This content outlines the steps for performing an academic year transition (also known as Back-to-School or BTS) of Microsoft 365 devices in schools, including year-end closeout and new year launch for:

This reference also covers:

  • EDU tenant management and maintenance
  • Security/identity compliance review

This reference is intended for education professionals responsible for these efforts, including:

  • System or school leaders
  • IT administrators
  • Teachers
  • Microsoft partners

Note

Depending on your school setup scenario, you may not need to implement all steps.

BTS use cases

Here's a list of use cases that an EDU organization should consider when using this reference material.

  • End of school approaches and your organization:
    • Has used SDS to provision users and/or classrooms
    • Has created Microsoft 365 Groups with other options, like Graph API
    • Needs to decide on storage and management of current content in tenant
    • Needs to change status of student accounts to alumni
    • Needs to verify inactive accounts manage lifecycle process
  • Beginning of school year approaches and your organization:
    • Needs to update user provisioning procedures with new students within Microsoft 365 and other pertinent data locations
    • Need to create data connection to SIS or other systems in order to feed user provisioning and/or classroom data for new school year

Process overview

This process centers on the configuration of Microsoft Education technologies in an EDU organization tenant for two purposes:

  • Clean up the tenant for the current year
  • Prepare for the next curriculum year

The process is typically based on four areas:

  1. School Data Sync (Classic) / School Data Sync (SDS) - Manage expirations, clean up the EDU tenant, and prepare and launch the new school year in SDS to provision users and classroom content in the EDU tenant
  2. Microsoft Teams (Microsoft 365 Groups) - Evaluate and manage current groups and teams provisioned in the tenant for current and future deployments
  3. Identity - Clean up inactive and graduating accounts in Microsoft Entra ID and review retention capabilities (such as bulk password reset), group policy, Conditional Access policy, and Microsoft Entra Connect setting and configuration
  4. Devices - Clean up existing devices for the end-of-year close out and prepare for new year launch and new device deployments

Picture showing timeline of academic year transition for Microsoft 365 for Education. Three weeks before end of school, prepare for SDS profile expiration and end of year closeout for devices and Microsoft Teams. Two weeks after end of school, perform cleanup for Teams, existing devices, SDS tenant, and Microsoft Entra ID. Ten weeks before school starts, prepare Teams, SDS, Microsoft Entra retention capabilities, and devices. Two weeks before school starts, prepare for new school year launch.

For more information

The following resources provide additional information about Microsoft 365 for Education:

Next steps

Let's begin with the configuration of School Data Sync (Classic) / School Data Sync.

Next: School Data Sync (Classic) / School Data Sync>