19

Oct

Microsoft Office 365 & BPOS


Microsoft made a big announcement today – Office is available online!

Yes Office Web Apps have been with us for a little while but they are lacking many features and, in the corporate world, you need a full Office licence on your desktop to use them. This however is “proper” online Office so, just like the original BPOS offerings such as Exchange & Sharepoint, it exists solely in the cloud…no on premise(s) software required.

There were also name changes, new products and new prices announced today so let’s take a look at the whole shebang!

Office 365

This is the new name for Microsoft’s cloud services, both existing and new. Family members include:

Office 365 Small Business

Office 365 for Enterprise (BPOS V2)

BPOS Government

Live@EDU

To be honest, I’m not really sure about the name. Maybe it will grow on me but for now at least, it feels a bit cheap and I’ve already seen people asking what happens on day 366 of a leap year Smile

Office 365 Small Business

This cut down version of Microsoft’s cloud offerings is, as the name suggests, aimed at small businesses with up to 25 users and offers:

  • Exchange Online
  • Sharepoint Online
  • Lync Online
  • Office Web Apps
  • External Web Site

for $6 per user per month.

Office 365 for Enterprise

BPOS V2 aka Union will be available in the first half of 2011, as per Mary Jo Foley’s info.

This will give companies:

  • Office Professional Plus
  • Exchange Online
  • Sharepoint Online
  • Lync Online
  • 24×7 Phone Support
  • On Premise(s) licences

It’s to be noted that the upcoming Wave 14 releases of the online products will introduce dozens of new features that make them much more compelling to businesses, such as the ability to federate Lync and host extranets on Sharepoint:

Read Microsoft BPOS- More new features

All this will cost just $24 per user per month – that is really amazing!

Availability

Beta testing across 13 countries has started, with beta sign up available at:

http://www.office365.com

If you can get it to load up for you – I’m having no luck!

Office365 will be available in 40 countries during 2011. It will then expand to include Dynamics CRM 2011 Online (a great product) and then a separate Educational focused offering will arrive, rolling into it Live@EDU.

Follow @Office365 for more info.

I’m already thinking of a number of our clients who will be very interested in Office Online but one question I have already been asked is:

“Can I get Office Online as a separate product?”

I don’t think so but I will check…

974 days ago Short URL Comments

BPOS/S+S/Cloud/Education/Microsoft/Office365

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04

Oct

Microsoft Enrolment for Education Solutions (EES)


Microsoft licensing has a new family member, Enrolment for Education Solutions AKA EES.

Currently, there are 2 education specific licensing programs, Schools Agreements & Campus Agreements (I’m not including Open Academic & Select Academic as specific). These offer huge savings over standard licence costs but there are certain requirements that don’t always please people, mainly the requirements to cover ALL eligible desktops, even if they’re already licenced or not to be used for that purpose.

Last year, Microsoft introduced a pilot licensing scheme for education called SESP, which I covered here:

Read Microsoft Licensing- Subscription Enrollment for Schools

Not much has been heard about SESP since then, but it’s influence can definitely been seen in EES.

It’s interesting to note that Live@EDU, the free email+ service for Further/Higher Education establishments will be fully integrated into EES.

What’s different?

The big change is that EES is based on an FTE (Full Time Employee) count, rather than the number of desktops. This will, for almost all schools and colleges, dramatically reduce the number of licences needed.

Another change is the ability to add “non-platform” products in any quantity at any stage of the contract. This will reduce costs as well as help reduce complexity and perceived “pointlessness” of licensing. A good example of this is one we had with a customer a year or 2 ago, where they wanted 70 something Terminal Service CALs but they were required to purchase 700+ as that was their desktop count! Many grumbles were made about that as 600+ of them were never used and seen as a complete waste of money.

Something else that will help organizations further reduce costs is the ability to pro-rate the pricing of additional products, with a minimum charge of 6 months. For example:

Product added in month 3 = full price x 0.75

Product added in month 9 = full price x 0.5

You can also define an organization in a much more granular fashion so it could be:

  • Entire school district
  • Entire school
  • Just Year 11
  • Just the science departments

or more…much more flexible Smile

However you define the organization, the minimum entry point is still 300 units.

What exactly is FTE?

Perhaps not surprisingly, FTE isn’t quite as straight forward as just “Full Time Employees”! The actual calculation is:

image

“Non desktop PC Users” such as maintenance or food service staff can be excluded from the count. MS point out that you must include “student employees”, although I’m not sure what they are?!

Launch

EES is being made available at different time in different regions, and also through different channels. December 2010 will see the limited launch of EES.

In the US & Canada = December launch of EES under Campus Agreement via Distribution & Value Add Resellers (VARs).

In EMEA = December launch of EES to Campus Customer only via Large Account Resellers (LARs) only.

In APAC = December launch of EES under Campus Agreement via LAR only.

It won’t be available to primary & secondary schools in EMEA until March 1st 2011.

989 days ago Short URL 1 Comment

Education/licensing/Microsoft

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16

Mar

Windows 7 Cram Live Meeting


If you saw the Windows 7 Exam Cram session that was running on March 11th but missed the actual event (like me), the recording is now available online here:

https://www112.livemeeting.com/cc/microsoft/view?id=DC031110&pw=webcast

So if you’re working towards some Windows 7 exams (at least 70-680 & 70-685) or would like to but not sure where to start, head over there and get started…I will be ASAP!

1191 days ago Short URL Comments

Education/exams/Microsoft/Technical/Training/windows 7

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21

Jan

BETT Show 2010


The BETT show is the world’s largest Educational IT Tradeshow and this was my first year there…what a time it was!

The Good Old British weather made an appearance, giving us 4-5 inches of snow on the Wednesday morning; the day I and 2 colleagues travelled down to London! I wasn’t sure if I’d get to the train station and, even if I did, would the train be running? Would the tube be working? As it turned out, everything went fine and we got to London on time.

However, the weather did manage to make it a bit more difficult for me. Due to the snow, our big, heavy, all in one PC didn’t arrive at work until after the kit was taken down to London…which meant that yours truly had to carry it down on the train! It was certainly a learning experience and here are some of the lessons I gained:

  • All in one PCs are pretty heavy
  • Boxes and snow don’t mix
  • Boxes are always a bit bigger than the gap you’re trying to get through
  • Cardboard is a terrible material to use for a handle

Bechtle are quite a broad reseller so we had various attractions on our stand including ultra short throw projectors & ASUS Eee PC’s/Box’s…but the best bit was my Microsoft software section :-) The centre piece was the aforementioned 23” HP Touchsmart Q600 multi touch all-in-one pc:

IMAG0015

Unfortunately, this is the best picture I’ve got of the Touchsmart…you can see the Surface Globe running on there if you look past the reflection!

Brilliantly, this came with the Microsoft Touch Pack pre-installed…which is just as great as it seemed when I heard about it. The Surface Globe is based on Virtual Earth and is a fully multi-touch globe with great deep level zoom available plus, in places like London, New York etc, they’ve got 3D monuments in there too :-) Everyone loved this app…especially as it’s got such an obvious use in schools. Put one of these in the library or the classroom and Geography just got a whole lot cooler!

Most people went to have a look at their house and got quite excited when they found their car. However, we had a few people who found unfamiliar cars outside their house and looked a little worried as to what had been happening!

Of the other apps in there, the Surface Lagoon went down very well…the water effects are SO realistic it’s crazy!

International Reach:

Although Bechtle were at BETT 2009, I wasn’t so I was quite surprised by a number of things, especially the pulling power of the show. I spoke to people from South Africa, Norway & Malaysia among others…they’d come all the way to London to see what new advances there were in Educational IT this year…I really didn’t expect there to be so many international attendees.

There were also a number of international exhibitors. There were quite a few from Germany and the furthest afield I saw was Brazil!

Contacts:

It was great to finally meet a few people from Twitter…(always good to meet in person) and a shame that i missed meeting so many other people. Even though I was there for 3 days, there was hardly any spare time…if not before, hopefully BETT2011!

Pictures:

Despite my best intentions, I only took a few pictures (and most of those aren’t very good!) so I can’t do the photo gallery I had planned, but here are the few pics I did take:

IMAG0011 IMAG0031 The Bechtle Stand…                                    The Bechtle stand (in action)

IMAG0025 IMAG0030

The Dell robot…                                           Ode to Olympia…

IMAG0017

A shot of some of our freebies, including the awesome Slinky…surely the best giveaway of the show?! ;-)

As you’ll no doubt have spotted, our t-shirts were a lovely super bright yellow…not my choice at all, but it did make it easy for people to find me in the hubbub!

Thanks:

Thanks to everyone who came to visit us on the stand and everyone who listened to me talk about Windows 7, Office 2010, Sharepoint 2010, Educational licensing and everything else. It was great to meet so many people from all over the world and hopefully we’ll build up some great relationships over the coming months/years :-)

1245 days ago Short URL Comments

BETT/Education/General/Microsoft

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30

Nov

Bechtle @ Bett 2010


BETT “is the world’s largest educational technology event” and Bechtle will be there for our 2nd year 13th-16th Jan 2010. It really is a very important event in the world of Education…

95% of exhibitors at BETT 2009 felt they met a good quality of visitor at the show

88% of exhibitors have said that attending BETT is important to their business

89% of visitors agreed that BETT is excellent for finding new products and suppliers

Last year our stand was hardware focussed, all about Thin Clients, Servers and other such things. This year however is different, as I’ve commandeered quite a big portion of the stand for Software ;-) I’ve been planning recently and, while it’s not 100% confirmed yet the set list looks something like this:

Demos:

  • Windows 7
  • Windows 7 Touch
  • Office 2010
  • Sharepoint 2010
  • Semblio

Discussions:

  • Academic Licensing
  • Cloud Computing/BPOS
  • Windows Server 2008 R2 w/ Windows 7
  • Windows Server 2008 R2 & Virtualization
  • Licensing in a Virtual Environment

I’ve got a busy few weeks ahead of me building and perfecting the demos, but it should be good fun. I’m also on the verge of ordering some of our swag for stand visitors and I think everyone will agree, it’s pretty awesome ;-)

So if you’re at #BETT2010 @ London Olympia Jan 13-16…come and see me on Stand G118 :-)

1297 days ago Short URL Comments

bechtle/BETT/blog/BPOS/S+S/Education/exchange 2010/licensing/Microsoft/office 2010/office web apps/Sharepoint 2010/Technical

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05

Nov

Bechtle & Windows 7 in CRN


As I’m sure you’ve guessed from my blog, I quite like Windows 7 ;-) Thus I’ve been very active in talking to our customers about Redmond’s latest OS and how it can help them. We’ve been working on a number of early deployments since July and this week saw CRN (computer Reseller News) publish an article on one of them :-)

You can read the article over at:

http://www.channelweb.co.uk/crn/analysis/2252314/opening-windows-4870698

Deploying Windows 7 has helped this customer in so many ways, it’s a really great example of the power that Windows 7 holds!

1322 days ago Short URL Comments

bechtle/Case Study/Education/windows 7

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30

Oct

Microsoft Semblio


Microsoft Semblio is a new iteration of their development platform which utilises .NET and WPF (Windows Presentation Foundation) and is specifically targeted towards the educational market.

Semblio can be used to create information rich, graphically engaging, immersive learning materials using a wide range of multimedia, all aimed at enhancing the learning experience for students (and indeed, the teaching experience for teachers!). As it is based on the .NET Framework:

“it works across software, services, and learning management systems.”

However, it isn’t just for developers. The Semblio assembly tool, which will ship with Office 2010, will:

“allow multiple content types to be combined into a single, rich, multimedia presentation, all in a single, familiar, and easy-to-use Microsoft Office-like application”

image

This has got something of a Web 2.0 “mashup” stle about it and will certainly be familiar and more engaging for students than more traditional methods. This next screenshot shows the kind of interactivity that can be expected:

Semblio screenshot1

Using the slider to increase/decrease the temperature and seeing the effects on the water…

Benefits:

This can either mean that schools will have the ability to create exciting learning materials in-house as well as making it easier for partners to create such materials too. You can:

  • Increase the value of your content by enabling educators to customize materials to their specific requirements.
  • Engage today’s students and foster exploratory learning with packaging and arrangement of dynamic, interactive, and rich instructional material.
  • Improve efficiency during content creation by enabling nontechnical subject matter experts to participate in the content creation process
  • Reduce the cost of going digital by creating your content once, then delivering it to all customers regardless of platform.

To me this looks like a great new addition to the Office suite of products and also a great addition to schools, for students and teachers alike. Having been on visits to various schools this year, it’s clear that they’re much more advanced that back in my day (!) and can sometimes rival corporations when it comes to technology adoption.

VLE’s (Virtual Learning Environments) such as Moodle, and products such as Sharepoint have made big changes to learning over the past few years; and I can see Semblio really making a mark. These interactive lesson modules delivered in Moodle accessed via Sharepoint would give a great experience for students at home/learning remotely.

I’d be interested to hear what people involved with Education think about this…be it students, teachers, IT managers, suppliers, coders etc :-)

Get Started:

Download the Semblio SDK.

Download Visual Studio 2008

Get familiar Service pack 1 of .NET 3.5 platform

Get familiar with WPF

If you want to get more in-depth, grab the programmer’s guide here.

Other Links:

Semblio: How it works

Semblio Blog

1328 days ago Short URL Comments

Downloads/Education/office 2010/Semblio/sharepoint/Sharepoint 2010

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26

Oct

MS Exam 70-680 training videos


Exam 70-680 is the new Microsoft MCTS exam for Configuring Windows 7 that builds towards the MCITP accreditations.

I’ve been thinking of taking this exam for a little while and now there is what’s shaping up to be an excellent series of training videos available from @Bibbleq. He’s an IT Admin and has started putting these videos together in his spare time to help out anyone looking at this exam – so ‘nuff respect for that :-)

I’ve watched the 1st 2 videos that are available and they’re really good. Well presented, clear and I’ve definitely picked up a thing or two, which is what it’s all about isn’t it?! I’m not sure how many will be in the series but I’m confident that once you’ve seen them all, you’ll be in a position to pretty much go and take the exam straight away!

First video is here.

Second video is here.

Third video is here.

Fourth video is here. This is the start of Section 2.

Section 2 Module 2 is here. This covers DISM & ImageX.

Homepage is here.

Nice one Bibbleq!

1332 days ago Short URL 3 Comments

Education/General/Technical/Training/Videos/windows 7

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10

Aug

Software Assurance Benefits for Education


Software Assurance to most people means just free upgrades to the latest versions but it has so many more benefits. I’m going to do a series of posts on the various extras it gives and this is the first one-looking at software assurance for Education.

There are a huge variety of different benefits available with Software Assurance and not all of them are available to both Corporate and Education customers. Also, some benefits are only offered with certain Volume Licensing schemes! Here we’re going to take a look at what benefits you get on what program.

The different Educational Volume Licensing schemes are:

  • Open Academic
  • Academic Select/Select Plus
  • Campus/School Agreement (also SESP in UK)

 

New Version Upgrades: Gives upgrades to the latest version of software. Available on all schemes.

Home Use Program: Allows each Office Application licence to also be used at home. Available on Campus/School Agreement & SESP only.

Windows Vista/7 Enterprise: Allows each copy of Business/Pro to be installed as Enterprise. Available on all schemes.

E-Learning: For each Office Application/Windows Client/Server Licence, you get one licence for the applicable E-learning courses. Available on all schemes.

Cold Back Up for Disaster Recovery: For each server licence, you can run one instance on a “cold” backup server. Available on all schemes.

Technet Plus Direct: Gives you 1 subscription for Technet Plus. Not available on Open Academic.

Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs: Cutdown OS based on XP Embedded for older machines. Available on Campus/School Agreement & SESP only.

Extended Hotfix Support-Server: Available on all schemes.

Extended Hotfix Support-Desktop: Not available on Open Academic.

One benefit that isn’t available to Education customers is the entitlement to Training Vouchers.

The Microsoft page for the above is here.

The above are the direct benefits of Software Assurance but there are 2 slightly more indirect benefits:

Ability to purchase VECD: “Vista/Virtual Enterprise Centralised Desktop” is the required base for deploying a Microsoft VDI infrastructure and allows you to centrally store instances of the Desktop OS on your servers. For more info-see my post here and my post on VDI here.

Ability to purchase MDOP: The “Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack” is an excellent set of extra tools that can really improve and streamline your Systems Management. Components include App-V, MED-V, Error reporting and much more. I’ll be working on an MDOP post soon so will link that here ASAP :-) For now, here’s the official MDOP blog.

While these benefits often prove invaluable to Secondary schools/colleges, recent discussions I’ve had indicate that they’re not so attractive to primary schools. I’d love to get some feedback on that point?! :-)

If all/some of the above has piqued your interest-you next question is surely:

“How do I get Software Assurance?”

If you have Open/Select-you can choose to add Software Assurance (SA) when you purchase new licences. If you have a Schools/Campus/SESP agreement, all the licences are covered with SA as standard.

If you have any questions on the benefits of SA and/or how to obtain Volume licensing-feel free to drop me a mail at software@bechtle.co.uk or tweet me @richfrombechtle.

1409 days ago Short URL Comments

Education/licensing/Microsoft

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