Office 365 Education summer feature summary
I took a vacation and have been away for a bit and a lot things have occurred in Office 365. Let me summarize some of the key Office 365 and Azure Active Directory features which I feel are most relevant to education customers that were announced or launched this summer:
Class Dashboard and School Information Sync
We announced a preview here and here. This is very exciting as we can now provide a classroom dashboard for teachers and students to collaborate and share assignments, etc. With the addition of SIS Sync, you will be able to synchronize classes from a local SIS into Office 365.
OneNote Class and Staff Notebook installed in education tenants
We added the OneNote Class and Staff Notebooks to all education tenants now so that you do not have to install it from the SharePoint store now. It also will appear on the app launcher bar.
Azure AD Connect
This became available for download last week. This is an automated wizard for installing Azure AD Sync with Password Sync or just AAD Sync combined with ADFS from 2012 R2. It will be a replacement for AAD Sync, DirSync and FIM longer term. If you currently use these sync options you should look for a transition at some point AAD Connect sync in the future.
More info here.
Oauth support for Outlook on iOS and Android
This has been the one education customers have been waiting for to eliminate the need to have the password key in the cloud datacenter and password hash on the iOS or Android device. With the new Oauth support for Outlook for iOS and Android you can now authenticate directly into Exchange Online and eliminate the security concerns for the application storing a password key (datacenter) and hashed password (locally) using Outlook for iOS and Android with the previous Basic authentication.
See more here.
Office for Mac 2016
Great new release for faculty, staff and students on Office 365 and have Office 365 ProPlus licensing. This includes an updated Excel, Word, Outlook, PowerPoint, and OneNote. You can only get it first via Office 365 and it will be available later this year on Volume licensing and retail.
Here is a new Office 2016 for Mac FAQ published here.
Nice quick start end user guides for Office 2016 for Mac here.
Grab Office for Mac 2016 in your tenant here from any OSX 10.10 or later device.
Skype Meeting Broadcast, PSTN conferencing and Cloud PBX Preview
This feature has been one that a lot of my education customers have expressed interest in for education streaming for sports, lectures, townhalls, up to 10,000 users.
Attendee view
The cool feature is the LIVE DVR feature – you can pause live shows or join late and watch from the beginning.
Watch a demo here.
The PSTN conferencing will allow for 1-800 type of dial in bridge for Skype for Business Online meetings.
The Cloud PBX will allow for PBX functionality in the cloud with dialtone, IP phone support, and PBX like features.
Sign up for one or all three of these awesome Skype Preview features here.
OneDrive for Business enhancements
Set OneDrive for Business quotas:
You can now change the OneDrive for Business quotas to less than 1TB. It can be set at any value between 1GB and 1TB. The PS cmdlet takes in values as MB. It requires the SharePoint Online pshell cmdlets:
Set-SPOSite -Identity https://contoso-my.sharepoint.com/personal/user_contsoso_com -StorageQuota 3000 -StorageQuotaWarningLevel 2000
I get asked this one quite a bit and we now have the ability to remove the default permissions from OneDrive for Business to prevent accidental sharing:
Remove “Everyone”, “All Users” and “Everyone except external users” permissions from OneDrive for Business. It requires the SharePoint Online pshell cmdlets:
Set-SPOTenant -ShowEveryoneClaim $false
Set-SPOTenant -ShowEveryoneExceptExternalUsersClaim $false
Set-SPOTenant -ShowAllUsersClaim $false
Import Service for PST archives and SharePoint data:
Upload data option is for PST importing and the Drive shipping is for SharePoint document importing. See more here.
Exchange Online Advanced Threat Protection
This is solution can help with two areas which are common attack email vectors in education:
1) Malware or malicious URLs in email - zero day
2) Virus attachments sent in email - zero day
It is not available for education as of yet but hopefully in the near future. Read more here.
Compliance Center
New compliance center allows for all your compliance needs in a single interface. It is also adding in new features like reporting, auditing, etc.
Read more on it here.