End to end deployment guide for Microsoft Education

[Sam McNeill]

Hi All,,

With an eye to 2018 school device setups, along with increasing numbers of schools asking how they can use Minecraft Education Edition for teaching computational thinking and intro to programming, I've collated a new set of setup videos into a single blog post so that schools , IT admins, or edu partners can easily see the latest "how to" guides from MS:

https://samuelmcneill.com/2017/08/03/microsoft-education-cloud-solution-end-to-end-guide-for-deployment/

This starts from setting up an Educational O365 tenant (needed even if you want to just run M:EE alongside other cloud suites you may be running already) through to pushing apps with Intune for Edu.

By following these guides, you could literally set up a fully functioning O365 environment in just a few hours.

Happy to answer any q's you may have from this.

Cheers,

Sam

[Yvette Ireton]

Thanks Sam for forwarding this information.  We have been a GAFE school since early 2009 but are now starting to pay more attention to this Cloud Transformation Strategy, as it seems the MOE wants us all to move in this direction in the future.  

We read the Nayland College Case Study  with interest.  We feel the financial savings will be significantly less for us.  It would be interesting to see a breakdown of Server Hardware expenditure that equates to the estimated $150,000.00 saving over 2 years, as stated in the article.  We are obviously in a much much much lower league if this sort of spending is considered normal.  

It would be interesting to hear of other cases and their experiences with moving to offsite servers.  At the moment it appears we would still need a Server to run Kamar and possibly some storage for large media files for Video Editing/Photography etc.

Cheers

Yvette

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Network Manager
Golden Bay High School
12 Waitapu Road, Takaka 7110
Ph:  03 525 9914
http://www.gbh.school.nz

[Mike Etheridge]

Savng $75k a year? It's either hype, or some people are being oversold hardware. That is a lot of iron.

Sent from Samsung Mobile

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[Craig Knights]

Probably counting a staff salary or outside support to look after those servers....

Craig

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[Rohan Meuli]

Yvette - if it's of interest, we'd be happy to refer you to a school for whom we host Kamar externally.

Regards

Rohan@Our School Ltd

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[Kent Champion]

No, definitely states hardware only “the school estimates that it is saving $150,000 (NZD) in hardware over two years” no mention about support cost or staffing cost.

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Network Manager
Golden Bay High School
12 Waitapu Road, Takaka 7110
Ph:  03 525 9914
http://www.gbh.school.nz

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[Sam McNeill]

Hi Yvette

Thanks for your reply (and the others who have also contributed).

Firstly, I want to say I really want to respect the focus of this group which is primarily technical advice and sharing, so I don't want to fill this up with anything that some may perceive as "sales talk" - this is definitely not the place for that. Many of you know that I come from a technical and education background (most recently St Andrew's College) and in my new role when I do share on here it is usually just guides for deployment around the various MSFT solutions, or the occasional message around licensing changes.

That said, I'm obviously happy to answer questions from this awesome community if they're directed at me - and I'll usually take this off line from the main group thread here for the above reasons. Therefore, Yvette, I'll reach out to you directly via email and we can connect on a call or the like if easier.

Regarding the Nayland College case study that Yvette mentioned - it's no secret the MoE is pushing for cloud first schools in NZ and Tim Harper (amongst others) has done a good job sharing the latest updates from the MoE in this space. There has, at times, been very robust debate on the topic on this group too which is great. I've personally not been too close to the Nayland situation but another member of this group shared the following article with me this morning (https://www.stuff.co.nz/nelson-mail/news/95361121/nayland-college-recognised-by-microsoft) which shows the school has been selected as a "Microsoft Showcase School." I raise this only to point out that as part of this, there is a requirement they are open to enquiries from other schools about how they're using MSFT technology.

Therefore, I'd certainly encourage those with questions around the $150K savings mentioned by the Principal to reach out to him / the school and learn more directly from them. The article also mentions visits and I know of two schools in the Horowhenua/Manawatu district that have gone and visited Nayland to see how their cloud transformation is working out for them. Again, encourage you to do this too if you want to see first hand.

Yvette: re: Kamar on/off premise I've heard compelling arguments both ways. Rohan is managing it for some of his customers off site and, I stand under correction, doesn't Kamar itself offer a hosted solution? In the end, bandwidth/latency can sometimes be the determining factor and I had an Edu partner tell me just this week how their schools in the South Island on N4L see some "interesting" things in terms of latency compared to their North Island schools. There is very smart people on this group who know the ins/outs of Kamar far better than I so I won't presume to speak with authority here, but at the very least I think you have some options in this space.

Have a fantastic Friday guys,

Regards,

Sam

[Sam McNeill]

HI Guys,

Just further to the main thrust of this thread around end to end management, I've just receive the following link highlighting how you can manage/assign licensing for apps in the MSFT Business/Edu store. Whilst it is still in preview (you're warned!) this has been consistently asked for by schools around Minecraft Education Edition in particular to simplify the deployment of M:EE (especially in scenarios where schools purchase only a class set of licenses and want to assign/revoke as classes rotate through a M:EE module):

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-store/microsoft-store-for-business-education-powershell-module

Hope this helps,

Sam

[Robert Baird]

Haven't posted here for a long time but have worked for the last 2 years for a local government authority in the UK currently engaged in a 2 year project to move a 14-host VMware farm (200+ VMs) into Azure/AWS. Might be slightly off-thread but I'm happy to field any questions. We've got all sorts of challenges with 20 year old software packages (not a joke), tax processing servers that can't survive more than 50ms latency (not a joke either), and everything in between. Not to mention the elegance of LGA policy and red tape, and figuring out what Brexit means in the public cloud. 

Quick background, previously worked at Hagley College (Chch) and before that Mackenzie College (Fairlie).