Microsoft Office 365 for Education review

As businesses continue to question whether they’re ready for the cloud, school leaders are asking themselves the same thing.

ICT budgets, like all others, are being squeezed and the potential cost savings from external hosting, facilitating the use of student-owned devices and reducing expenditure on computer suites, are appealing.

Resilience and security are just as important, though, and recent high-profile leaks of confidential data and subsequent service outage remain at the forefront of many people’s minds.

It’s against this backdrop that Microsoft is poised to launch its cloud-based office and collaboration solution into the education sector.

Called Office 365 for Education, the basic service brings together email, document sharing and collaboration tools, while a more expensive plan includes cut-back, web-based versions of the primary Office applications.

Providing it mirrors the Enterprise versions, as Microsoft claims, the top-level subscription will also include a full licence for Office 2010 Professional Plus.

At first glance, Office 365 appears to be more evolutionary than revolutionary, in the main bringing together tools that have previously been released under other names. Schools already using the Live@Edu service are likely to find the Office 365 services particularly familiar.

Microsoft faces tough competition, however. Google has established itself in the education marketplace, offering an ever-growing number of free, web-based applications that have proved innovative and reliable enough for many learners and educators to embrace wholeheartedly.

It’s clear from its marketing material that Microsoft hopes the familiarity of the Office 365 interface will claw these defectors back.

Exchange Online

At the core of Office 365 is Exchange Online, offering email, a calendar tool and contacts with built-in antivirus and anti-spam protection.

For schools not yet using Exchange, it provides an easy way to introduce the industry standard solution, and for those that already do, there are benefits of pushing their data into the cloud. All users are, for example, provided with a generous 25GB mailbox and 25MB limit for attachments.

Exchange Online provides a multitude of ways to access your data. To access the full range of functions and features, it’s best to connect through the Outlook 2007 or 2010 applications, either from home or in school, but the Outlook Web App provides a surprisingly feature-rich experience through any browser.

Smartphone and tablet users are well catered for, too – an important consideration if students don’t have access to a dedicated machine during, or outside of, the school day. In our tests, the service works superbly on the iPhone and iPad, through both the built-in applications and the browser, allowing us to read, create and edit emails, contacts and calendar events.

Recent announcements from Microsoft and RIM suggest that a similar level of functionality may soon be available to BlackBerry users, with a BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) included free as part of Office 365.

While students are most likely to focus on the communication elements of Exchange, the power of the calendar tool as an organisational tool shouldn’t be overlooked.

Arranging meetings is a breeze, either using the built-in scheduling assistant or by overlaying the calendars of colleagues to identify potential times.

Schools can create and maintain multiple calendars and then share them with students and staff. These could include school or department events, sport fixtures or examinations.

With responsibility for these delegated to the right users, staff and students will always see the most up-to-date information every time they access the calendar through Outlook, their browser or their mobile device.

SharePoint Online

The SharePoint Online facility provides schools with a site to share documents and other information. Documents can be created on-the-fly through the browser-based applications, or created and uploaded automatically from their more powerful desktop counterparts.

It’s this tight integration that perhaps best defines this service. SharePoint allows a link to a document to be shared with users who can then visit, work on and have their changes automatically merged into that file. Documents can even be downloaded and worked on offline, then automatically synchronised back into the SharePoint workspace.

In theory, SharePoint provides a fantastic opportunity to create a collaborative environment for staff, students and parents.

However, many schools have gone down the route of implementing virtual learning environments (VLEs), committing time and resources to create content-rich pages and experiences for students to access no matter where they are. Unlike SharePoint, VLEs such as Moodle and Frog are specifically geared at schools, offering proven, education-specific tools.

Similarly, many schools have introduced electronic portals for parents that allow access to data from the school’s management information system (MIS), including their child’s examination results and attendance.

Although some of the functionality of SharePoint could potentially be integrated into such services, few schools are likely to abandon systems that provide such functionality for a more generic system.

Administration and management seem perhaps the most obvious uses of SharePoint within the education environment. All too often the number of policies, SEFs and school development plans being created and distributed for staff to comment on – and amend –results in a mess of versions floating around in home drives, inboxes and USB memory sticks.

SharePoint provides a more centralised system of management and control. With the ability to define a team and then provide access to a site for online discussions and document sharing, SharePoint also allows users to effectively collaborate and improve productivity.

Where appropriate, school governors or members of the LEA could be involved too.

Lync Online

Lync Online forms the final part of the entry-level subscription. Described by Microsoft as a “next-generation cloud communications service”, Lync introduces instant messaging (IM), audio/video calls and online meetings.

Essentially, it’s designed to take communication to the next level, not replacing email, but supplementing it with a more immediate and engaging method of contact.

The “presence” element is a particularly interesting development, indicating to a user as they type an email or work on a shared document whether the recipient or collaborator is online, and providing the option to launch a conversation.

Many of the features of Lync, such as screen share and the virtual whiteboard, have obvious applications for education, but we suspect that few schools will be ready or willing to use it as Microsoft envisages.

Schools aren’t businesses, and students and teachers don’t spend all of their time on computers or using mobile devices. Rather, it’s as schools look to broaden their horizons, establishing links with other schools at home and abroad, that these technologies could come into their own.

It’s also possible that experts in various disciplines from around the world may use the Lync technologies to host online lectures or classes, as many already do using webinar tools.

Is your data safe?

Schools adopting Office 365 will have their data hosted at Microsoft’s flagship cloud datacenter in Dublin, although there is the option to retain some servers on-site too.

Microsoft’s 19-acre facility, which has every major quality assurance certification, also includes a seamless failsafe switchover to its other European datacenter in Amsterdam.

Hosting data off-site always poses issues regarding security, resilience, data protection and disaster recovery, but these same issues still exist when hosting data on-site. There are few schools with high-level data security expertise in-house, or the ability to monitor and maintain their servers 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

By moving to web hosting, schools free up investment and skills to focus on areas that will deliver an educational impact, while maintaining a high level of service.

And while Microsoft’s engineers look after the service in the main, administrators can still have access to information about the health of the service and any planned maintenance.

Conclusion

We’ll say one thing for Office 365: Microsoft has made it an easy system to migrate to, thanks to a wizard-based system to manage the whole process. User accounts are easily created, including integration with existing Active Directory roles and policies.

Office 365 is an interesting proposition and one that should be given serious consideration by schools; for those already using the Live@Edu services it’s a natural progression, although questions are bound to be asked about the advantages of a paid-for service in comparison to one that’s free.

All the same, for most ICT professionals in schools, it’s important that any solution introduced supports the school’s learning and teaching objectives and answers problems that already exist.

Office 365 looks like it will partly succeed here, but it’s hard to escape the feeling that it’s designed for business before being sold to schools. Changing this impression is Office 365’s biggest challenge.

Update on pricing

Following comments on this article, we asked Microsoft for some clarification over the pricing. Here is its response:

“Whilst the final Office 365 for Education pricing is to be determined, the base Office 365 for Education offering is free for all academic students, staff, and faculties.

“More advanced features and functionality and faculty SKUs will be offered for a very small licence fee (up to 90% off commercial pricing) and all officially recognised academic institutions qualify for this offer.”

Details
Software subcategory	Office software
Requirements
Processor requirement	N/A
Operating system support
Operating system Windows Vista supported?	yes
Operating system Windows XP supported?	yes
Operating system Linux supported?	no
Operating system Mac OS X supported?	yes