This week saw the first anniversary of Microsofts Office 365 and in that year Microsoft has seen many, many organisations adopt the collaboration platform across public and private sectors. And this is certainly a trend Equanet are seeing further enforced this week at our Microsoft Windows 8 and Cloud event.
A further announcement this week was the availability of Office365 for Education to officially replace Live@@EDU.
Office 365 for Education replaces Live@edu, which will remain available for 18 more months to give its customers -- about 10,000 educational institutions with about 22 million students in about 130 countries -- a window for planning and carrying out the migration.
Although Office 365 is a cloud-based suite, it can require upgrades to customers' desktops and infrastructure depending on the case.
The first thing to keep in mind is that while Live@edu and Office 365 for Education are conceptually designed to serve the same type of customer, they have several different components.
Live@edu, which is free, includes Outlook Live for email, Office Web Apps, Windows Live Messenger for instant messaging and Windows Live SkyDrive for 25GB of online data storage.
Office 365 for Education comes in a variety of packages. The free, standard one, called A2, includes Exchange Online, Lync Online, SharePoint Online and Office Web Apps.
The Office 365 Exchange Online component is basically the same as Live@edu's Outlook Live, so transferring from one to the other should be fairly straightforward.
Should you want to onboard The A2 plan, which includes the online versions of Office, Lync and SharePoint, or the fee-based and more sophisticated A3 and A4 plans, they must sign a new Microsoft Online Services agreement or a current Volume Licensing Agreement.
Live@edu users will be able to retain their SkyDrive accounts even after the suite is decommissioned .
The Office 365 for Education Plan A2 includes the online version of Office 2010, called Office Web Apps, instant messaging and conferencing via Lync Online, collaboration capabilities via SharePoint Online, email and calendar via Exchange Online, antivirus and anti-spam protection and individual storage.
Plan A3 costs £1.98per student per month, and £3.50 per faculty/staff per month, and includes everything in Plan A2 plus additional components, including the full-featured desktop version of Office 2010 Professional Plus and voicemail service.
Plan A4, at £2.38 per month per student and £4.75 per month per faculty/staff, adds voice communications.
So if you are a Live@EDU user and need help migrating your infrastructure to Office 365 you would be well placed to contact us to see how we can help.
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