Here you can find the transcript of Episode #122 of PiaSys TechBites.

Welcome back to PiaSys Tech Bites. Today, we start a new series of videos about Microsoft 365 Education. In fact, nowadays, unfortunately school from home is a real need for all of the students and the teachers all over the world. And luckily Microsoft has been providing since a while ago, free access to Microsoft 365 to all of the schools all over the world. So, today I want to start with you a new series of videos, where I will explain you how to set up a Microsoft 365 Education tenant, how to configure your classes, how to import and synchronize students and teachers. And generally speaking, how to leverage the Microsoft 365 Education platform to provide school from home services. So, first of all, let’s move to the demo environment and let’s see how to create a new educational tenant.

In order to register your school and to get access to the free licenses of Microsoft 365 Education, you need to go to this page, microsoft.com/en-us/education/products/office and here you can provide the official email address of your school. You will go through an evaluation process and you will get the free licenses. Of course, if you want to start playing now with the Microsoft 365 Education licenses, you can also click on the learn how to buy for schools. You will be redirected to this page, where you can see what the licenses are for students and for teachers, faculty, and staff users. And as you can see, you will get an Office 365 A1 license for free for all of the students, teacher, faculty and staff users, which includes Outlook Web Access, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote Online, as well as the online services like Exchange, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, and so on and so forth.

And it will also include the School Data Sync service, which allows you to keep in sync the users in your Microsoft 365 Azure Active Directory tenant with an external resource like a system that you have in your school to manage the students, and teachers, and staff. So you can simply click on the get started for free. It will create a free demo tenant with 25 students and 25 teachers, faculty, or staff licenses. And then in the support section of the admin portal, you can make a request to upgrade this demo tenant to an actual education tenant connected to a real school. So I already did it for you just to speed up the process, so let me go to portal.office.com. And from here, I’m already authenticated in an education tenant. I can click on admin and you can see that we get access to the well-known admin UI of Microsoft 365, regardless of the fact that now I’m in a education tenant. In fact, the only difference is that if I go to billing and go to licenses, here we can see that I have some demo free licenses for the education target.

In fact, we have the Office 365 A1 for faculty and the Office 365 A1 for student and I have 25 of each, which I can use to play with the education tenant without the need to upgrade it to an actual school related to tenant. Of course, you can create users and you can associate licenses to users, as well as you can configure Microsoft Teams as the platform for managing your classes and your students in the classes. Just to give you an idea, we can for example, start teams.microsoft.com. And from here, we can stay in the web based UI and we can create a new class, kind of a container of all of the students, teachers, and people involved in a class.

And you can always go into a class, see the predefined template of a class Team provided by Microsoft and stuff like that. Now, starting from this episode and moving on through the following episodes, I will explain you how to configure the tenant, how to synchronize the users, meaning the students and the staff, and how to manage your education tenant in order to provide remote training services to your students and teachers. Like always thank you for watching this video. I hope you find it interesting and I’m really looking forward to seeing you next week. Remember subscribe to this channel. Thank you.