The talk will focus on UCC’s experience in deploying Office 365. While migrating nearly 5000 mailboxes to the new platform, we discovered a number of different technologies that we were licenced for that solved a number of difficulties we were experiencing:

ONEDRIVE FOR BUSINESS
Collaboration with external groups has always been a headache. Most people are happy to email files to each other until their mailboxes fill up with too many versions of the same document. Dropbox provides a solution for this but the University no longer controls the data which can become an issue with a transient workforce. An authenticated link as a method of sharing, is also problematic. Enter OneDrive, an option for easily sharing data internally and externally, with authentication provided through Microsoft and the University retains control over the data.

WEB APPLICATION PROXY
A number of our line of business application were not available externally and there was concern about making them externally available. By creating an application proxy in Azure, we could make these applications available through the office 365 MyApps portal and configure multi factor authentication if required. Options for single sign on are also available.

RIGHTS MANAGEMENT SERVICES
Email administrators are well used to the phone call with, I sent a file to the wrong person, how do I get it back? If it went externally, it’s gone! Rights management services changes this. They users themselves can restrict documents from being printed, copied, forwarded etc, put expiry times on them and most importantly, revoke them if required. Transport rules can also be configured on the email side to automatically encrypt based on rules.

LICENCE MANAGEMENT
The headache that is licence management! Being a university, our “customer base” is very turbulent. Cloud services bring a complexity as most licences are individually assigned rather than paying a lump sum based on FTE. To add to this some licences are assigned in Office 365 while others are assigned in Azure. The solution, a combination of Active Directory groups, AD User attributes, sync engine rules and PowerShell.

AND IF THERE IS TIME …
Sway – being used by academic program directors for newsletters to prospective students as well as being investigated by our learning technologists as an additional tool for teaching and learning

If you require information about any aspect of the conference please contact: Fi Coyle: fi.coyle@heanet.ie / +353 1 6609040