office 365 for education starter manual - bfc networks · this starter manual will give you a step...

Office 365 for education Starter Manual

Written by: Alex Pearce

Email: [email protected]

Blog: http://www.bfcnetworks.com/ajp

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.bfcnetworks.com/

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© Copyright: BFC Networks Limited 2012 www.bfcnetworks.com

Contents Storage .................................................................................................................................................. 3

Subscribing to Office 365 for education ................................................................................................ 4

Adding Licenses .................................................................................................................................... 8

Changing License for Admin User ....................................................................................................... 11

User Management .............................................................................................................................. 13

Add a Single User ............................................................................................................................ 13

Add Bulk Users ................................................................................................................................ 15

Create different views for your Users ................................................................................................. 17

Domain Names and DNS ..................................................................................................................... 19

Office 365 Products ............................................................................................................................ 21

Exchange Online ................................................................................................................................. 22

Lync Online ......................................................................................................................................... 25

SharePoint Online ............................................................................................................................... 28

Create your Public Facing Site ......................................................................................................... 28

Increase your SharePoint Storage Capacity .................................................................................... 30

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This starter manual will give you a step by step guide to implementing Office 365 for

education for your school or college. It will include the subscription process, how to register

your first domain to some simple Exchange, Lync and SharePoint housekeeping.

If you have any queries, don't be afraid to leave a comment on the Office 365 community

support page or get in touch through the BFC Networks website.

The first thing to note with Office 365 is that there are no differences between Office 365

for education and Office 365 for enterprise other than licensing. Businesses who subscribe

to the enterprise version have to pay for all services while you as a school or college get up

to A2 for free. So remember that if you are looking for some specific issue online, it should

be the same answer for education as enterprise.

So what is included in the Office 365 for education A2 license plan?

There are 3 main products in Office 365 which are Microsoft Exchange Online, Microsoft

Lync Online and Microsoft SharePoint Online. Each of these products have different feature

sets which are split into 2 for Office 365. You can have email services with Exchange but

then you can add the additional features to help manage your mailbox archiving. Lync

comes with additional features that allow you to replace your internal phone system with

Lync while SharePoint is a little more complicated as there are 2 additional features.

SharePoint online by default is SharePoint 2010 standard edition and the first feature added

is Office Web Apps. The next set of features include Access Service and Visio Services which

you are most likely not to use in your organisations at first.

Office 365 for education A2 license which is free comes with the standard Exchange,

standard Lync and SharePoint with the additional features of Office Web Apps but don't be

thinking that Microsoft have cut down on the features to offer less as what you get for free

is more than enough for your schools requirements.

If you do want additional feature such as the Lync phone features, you have to pay for these

features which you can do through the licensing area of Office 365.

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There are 4 main sections in Office 365 for education which are Exchange Online, Lync

Online, SharePoint Online and the Office 365 Admin Portal.

The Admin Portal is hosted at http://portal.microsoftonline.com which is the same for any

customer who subscribes to Office 365. The admin portal is where you can configure the

domains for your tenancy, licensing and create users. There are a lot more features you can

use in the Admin Portal but we will guide you through the essential features for now.

Another way of looking at the Admin Portal is that it is also the identity management service

to the main 3 products. When you have created a user, when that user tries to log into

SharePoint Online or their email

through Exchange, they will be using

the username you created in the

Admin Portal to authenticate.

When the user moves from

SharePoint to Exchange or vice versa

they will be automatically logged in

as they have already logged into one

of these services. This is done through the authentication process which is part of Office

365. When you first log into any of the services it leaves a token in your browser which

states who you are so when you first move from SharePoint to Exchange it looks for this

token and logs you in if you already have it, if you don't it will ask you to log in. If you sign

out of any of the products you are also signed out of the whole of Office 365.

Note: If you plan to use ADFS (Active Director Federation Services) for authentication it uses a different process for the user which will not be covered in this manual.

There are two sides to the Admin Portal. One is for you as admins to allow you to manage

your schools tenancy, domains, admin and configuration of Exchange, Lync and SharePoint.

The other side is for any kind of user created. From here they can change their password

and download the Lync software for their Windows PC or MAC. There are currently no ways

of restricting users from accessing this admin page.

Storage Both Exchange and SharePoint have limitations around the allocation of storage they have.

Each user has a 25GB mailbox which they can use while SharePoint allocation is based on

the number of users you have licensed in Office 365 for education. For each user licensed

you will have 500MB of SharePoint storage available. By default you will have to add this

additional storage to your SharePoint environment which is covered later in this starter

manual.

http://portal.microsoftonline.com/

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Subscribing to Office 365 for education When subscribing to Office 365 for education you are first given a 30 day trial, so if you are thinking

about using it or not sure if you really want to, try it out first.

The process to subscribing is all completed online through a browser. Microsoft are going to ask you

for some details such as your school name, school address, your email address and a contact

telephone number. These are all used to verify that you are an academic institution.

Navigate to the Office 365 for education trial subscription page. What you will see are the 3 main

plans for the service which we have already talked about. If you want to purchase A3 or A4, you will

be asked for some credit card details.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/office365/education/compare-plans.aspx

Click on the Sign up for 30-day trial image.

The free trial sign up form will appear, when we have completed this process we will then convert

the trial into a fully licensed tenancy.

Selecting the correct County or Region is very important as this is where you data will be sorted. If

you select US, all data will be sorted in a US data centre by Microsoft. By selecting your country, you

will get your data in right location (UK in an EU data centre).

At the bottom of the page you are asked for the New domain name: which is what your default

Microsoft domain name will be. If you decide not to put your own domain name in, your email

address would be [email protected]. We can add main domain names later

on so you can have [email protected].

http://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/office365/education/compare-plans.aspx



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The other important part of selecting your domain name is that this is what is going to be used for

your SharePoint environment default URL. If you are going to use

NewWaveAcademy.onmicrosoft.com, your SharePoint URL will be

NewWaveAcademy.sharepoint.com. You cannot change this in the future either so ensure you get

the right domain.

You may find that the domain you select is already taken, if this happens, you will have to create

another one.

When you have a domain that is available you are asked to fill out more information about the

admin account. It’s important that you don’t create this as your personal account, this is an admin

account that is used to manage everything. You will be able to create yourself a user with elevated

permissions when the tenancy is created.

This will now go away to build your tenancy for you, setting up Lync, Exchange and you first

SharePoint Site collection.

Read the terms and conditions and when you are happy click I Agree and continue at the bottom of

the page.

To manage the process of licensing for Office 365, Microsoft will validate your tenancy

before allocating you an Office 365 for education A2 license. This is to ensure that no

businesses get hold of an education license and get away with not paying for what they

should be. The first thing to do, when you have created your tenancy is to validate your

domain. Using the example of New Wave Academy, they have created their Office 365 for

education tenancy and are now at the domain validation stage. The school domain name is

newwaveacademy.com which they will also want to use for all their users for email. In the

domains section of the Admin Portal you will be asked to confirm that you have the

ownership of that domain. For New Wave Academy they will have to either create a TXT

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record or a MX record for the newwaveacademy.com domain. Microsoft will help you in the

Admin Portal which either of these need to be pointed to. Now it is very important to note

that you may already be using an MX record for your domain. An MX record is used

whenever anyone sends you an email. If you are emailing [email protected],

the email service will look up the MX record for that domain (@newwaveacademy.com) and

then route it accordingly to your email server.

If you already use your domain name you want to use it in Office 365 for education, make

sure you create the TXT record otherwise you may lose emails until you have either created

all your users or pointed the MX record back to your current email solution.

When the tenancy is created, you will be taken to a welcome page to verify your first domain name.

If you want to verify later you can do but remember to do this within the first 30 days otherwise you

trial will end and you may not be able to get the URL you want again.

The next step is to add the domain name you want to use for mail and Lync

(@newwaveacademy.com). We can add more domains later on if you want to use different domain

names for students.

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You are now given the details you need to create the DNS records to verify your domain. Microsoft

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give you some instructions that might help you with well-known domain hosting companies. The

TXT record will look something like this.

Note: Your TXT record will be individual to your tenancy so don’t copy from the image above.

If you selected to verify your domain later or have completed the verifying process you will have a

pop up box appear asking for some information about your admin account. Should you forget your

password and can’t access your Office 365 tenancy, Microsoft can reset your password and notify

you via text messaging and email. Add you country code and phone number. The reset process will

email your first and then send a text message to a mobile phone.

Adding Licenses As discussed earlier on, there are different type of licenses available. The standard Academic (A)

licenses are:

Code License

A1 Microsoft Exchange Free

A2 A1 + Microsoft Lync, Microsoft SharePoint, Office Web Apps Free

A3 A2 + Microsoft Office 2010 Pro, Microsoft SharePoint Online Enterprise, Microsoft Exchange/Lync Voicemail & archiving.

Chargeable

A4 A3 + Microsoft Lync Voice Chargeable

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When you have created your trial license you are given 25 facility A3 and 25 student A3 licenses

which will last 30 days. As you can see from the table above, the A3 license is a chargeable license

and at the end of your 30 day trial you will be asked to enter your school details or to delete that

type of license. It’s important that you use the right license when creating your accounts.

In the Admin Portal, down the left navigation you will find Purchase. Click on this.

You will notice that there are a lot of licensing types but the important one you are looking for is

Microsoft Office 365 (Plan A2). You will notice that the price is £0.00.

Click on the Add next to the basket and a new window will open up. You will see the option to add

the number of licenses you want.

You may want to do some maths before entering the number of students you want.

At the end of the academic year you will be creating new student accounts before you close your

previous set as you may have your new intake year in earlier and assign them an account in the

previous term.

Example: New Wave Academy has 5 intake years of students with 200 students in each year group

making a total of 1000 students. 2 months before the new intake arrive they have a welcome day at

the schools where the students come and see the school, learn more about the grounds and also

meet their new form teacher. While they meet with the form teacher for the first time they are

given their username and password. To give them access to Office 365 for education, you will need

to make sure they have a license, meaning New Wave Academy need 1200 student licenses

(remember they are free).

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Add the number of licenses you think you may need and then click Add to cart.

You are taken back to Purchases page. Now you can add the licenses you need for Faculty as well.

When you have added everything you need to your basket, click on Check out from the right hand

side.

You are asked if your school address is correct or not and then click on Next. Then you are asked to

review your order. Make sure you have Plan A2 for both Faculty and Students. Click Next.

Now you have been taken to the payment area. Microsoft have a standard payment system so even

though you are getting them for free you still have to go through this section. At the top you will see

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Payment Frequency, change this to Pay full year now. This will reduce the number of emails you get

in a year notifying you that your licensing bill has arrived (which will be at £0).

If you have purchased licenses at a cost, you can add your PO number if you want to. Click Next.

The final page before your licenses are delivered, you are asked to read the licensing agreement and

to type your name. You need to match the Customer name above the box.

Click Next and place your order.

You will be taken back to the Admin Portal home page. Down the left hand side click on Licenses

and you will see that your licenses have been delivered.

Changing License for Admin User By default the admin user that was created when you subscribed to Office 365 for education has one

of the A3 accounts. If you look at the image above you will see that 1 license has been assigned to

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the A3 for students. As these are paid for licenses, we want to remove this license from the Admin

user and add it as an A2 for Faculty user.

Log into the Admin Portal as the admin account and using the left navigation click Users that is

located under the Management. A page will load of all the users in the tenancy. Select the admin

account and then Edit.

The first page that loads is the licensing details of this user. You will see that the Admin User has

been allocated an A3 student license. Uncheck Microsoft Office 365 Plan A3 for Students and check

Microsoft Office 365 Plan A2 for Faculty.

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Click Save at the bottom of the page and the license details will be changed.

This now means that your A3 trial licenses can expire without you having to worry about the admin

user with one of those licenses or purchasing that license.

User Management This next section is going to go through the process of creating users and how we can assign these

licenses we have just purchased to staff and students.

This section is only going to cover how users can be created through the Admin Portal. If you want

users to be created automatically, you will need to look into Microsoft Online Directory

Synchronization (also known as DirSync). If you then want to look at Single Sign On, you will need to

look at Active Directory Federation Services 2.0. These aren’t covered in this starter manual,

however Microsoft provide great documentation in the Admin Portal at the top of the users page.

Add a Single User There are different types of users in your establishment, however they are all created the same way

and then you will assign the right license and settings for the user during the process of creation.

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The user we are going to create now is going to be a backup admin user so there will be some special

permissions added to allow access to the Admin Portal.

Log into the Admin Portal as your admin account and down the left hand side under Management

you will see Users.

You will now see the list users created so far. You will see a tool panel across the page such as Add,

Edit, Reset Password. Click New and you will see a drop down list which will be User or Bulk, select

User.

Start adding the details on this user. For the example below, this is going to be my Admin 2 account.

Click on Additional details and enter Office 365 Admin as the Department attribute. Later on we will

be creating different views based on the Department attribute of the users and this will be useful to

find all the Admin Account. Click Next when ready.

You are now at the Settings page and have two sections to fill out. The first is around Admin levels

to the Office 365 Admin Portal. As this is the admin account we want to give them Global

Administrator rights but if you need to give certain users permission to just reset other users

password or access billing information you can. You will not need to change this for staff or students.

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As this is an elevated user, you are asked to give an email address for information to be sent to. This

might be the email address of the user you are creating but you might decide to user your email

address or a Hotmail account.

Office 365 for education is a global product and you are asked to select where this user is located.

Different parts of the world have different rules around sharing of information and collaboration

such as Video Conferencing is not allowed in some countries. Ensure you select the right country for

the user and where they are located. This information is not shared but is used to enable services

for this user.

You are now asked to assign a license. Select the one you want but for this process we won’t as this

is an elevated account that only needs access to the Admin Portal. If you do want to give this admin

user email and access to Lync and SharePoint, it is recommended to give them a Facility license.

Ensure you are selecting an A2 license which are the free licenses and not one of the trial licenses.

During the process you are not given the ability to set the users password. Instead Microsoft do this

for you and the user is asked to change their password when they first log on. You are first asked

where you want the password to be emailed to (normally a Global administrator of your Office 365)

and on the next page you are also given the password.

Save this password, should you ever have problems logging in with your admin account. You now

have a backup admin account.

Add Bulk Users The bulk user process uses a CSV file to create multiple users and is uploaded to the Admin Portal to

create all the users in the file. There are certain dependences for each user to be created but the

Admin Portal has great error reporting to tell you exactly what is wrong. At the end of the process

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(like creating a single user) you are emailed the passwords and presented on the screen for all the

users. You will need Microsoft Excel to help you adding the users into the CSV file.

Log into your Admin Portal and select Users from the right hand side. Under New select Bulk.

As you will see on this page, Microsoft have given you the blank CSV file with the correct headers

and an example CSV file.

Download the blank CSV to your desktop and open the file.

When opening the file you will see several headers such as username, first name and last name. For

this CSV and Office 365 we want to fill in the following fields for each user:

Username (include the domain name ex. [email protected] or

[email protected] if you have verified your domain)

First name

Last name

Display name

Email address

Departments. Give all staff the department of Staff and students Students)



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Departments is not a required field but all of these fields should be filled in for good practice.

When completed, save the file to a location on your computer that you can easily find.

Navigate to your browsers and back to the page where you downloaded the example CSV file.

Upload the CSV file and click Next.

This will create the users for you and you will be asked for an email address to send the passwords

you want.

Create different views for your Users When we were creating our users earlier on, we added information to each user in the Department

attribute about the type of user they are such as staff. We are now going to use this information to

create different views. We want to create 3 different views for Staff, Students and Admins.

Log into the Admin Portal and using the left navigation click on Users.

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In the tool panel for users you will see View.

Here you can filter the users you have setup. What we want to do now though is create a few views

based on the user type.

From the drop down list click on New view.

This view is going to be for Admin Accounts. Give the view a name of Admin Accounts and fill in the

Department field with Admin Account. Now complete this process for the same information you

entered for staff and students.

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Now you have different views so you can manage the different groups. You may decide to put the

intake year in the department attribute so you can easily remove users or change their license when

they leave the school.

Domain Names and DNS During the setup stage we only validated the domain name to show that you are the owner of it.

Now we want to setup all the DNS records so we start receiving email and use Lync with the school

domain.

It is important only to change the email MX record when you are ready to migrate email. If you

move it without creating all your accounts, emails can get lost. Plan your migration and ensure all

the email addresses are created prior to your MX change.

Using the left hand navigation click on Domains located under Management. This is where you can

add additional domain names if you want and view the DNS Setting for each registered domain. In

the list you will see 2 domain. The first is the default domain that is created in your tenancy and the

other is the registered domain from earlier on. Select your school domain name and click on View

DNS settings.

You will now have a page with different DNS Records and they all point to something different.

Exchange Online

There are 3 records all together

MX

o This is how email is delivered. When an email is sent to @newwaveacademy.com it

looks at this MX record on the DNS servers and forwards it the destination server

you have set.

Autodiscover

o When you are configuring your mailbox for the first time you are asked to enter your

servers. In Microsoft Exchange you have the ability to have all this done for you so

all your users have to do is enter their email address and password. As an example

when a student is adding their email address for NewWaveAcademy.com and enter

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their password the device with automatically look at the autodiscovery DNS entry

and will try and pull all the server information it requires. This is a highly

recommended setting for you as it enables your users to have a better experience

and also saves you having to send out all the server information for the users to

enter.

Note: This is not just outlook.com, so add this DNS entry

TXT

o This is not required but is recommended to be created. This will be change from

what we configured earlier on.

Microsoft Lync

SRV SIP Federation

o Federation with Lync allows users to talk to other users of Lync outside of your

organization (if you enable it in the Admin Portal). Create this record anyway and

then at least you have it ready should you want to federate with another school.

SIPDIR

o This is used to allow users to log into Lync. If you don’t have this record no users will

be able to use Lync on your school domain

Lync Discovery

o This is the same as the auto discovery in Exchange Online. This will automatically

give the users logging in with this domain the settings and server details to log in.

Remember that each tenancy is different. Don’t copy the details from the screenshot below. Each

domain you have will be different.

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Office 365 Products Your tenancy is now deployed ready for your users. But what about a little guidance around

Exchange Online, Lync Online and SharePoint Online?

On the home page of the Admin Portal you have the ability to manage each of these three products

and this is going to be the starting point for each of the products.

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Exchange Online When you click on the Manage link for Exchange you are taken to the Exchange Control Panel also

known as the ECP. It will list all the users who have an Exchange account and their email address.

Here you can control different sections of your email service such as Distribution Groups, change

roles and configure the Unified Communications if you have purchased A4 licenses.

There are two ways of creating Distribution Groups in Exchange Online. The first is through the ECP

panel and the other is using PowerShell to create a Dynamic Distribution Group. The second of

these queries information on the user and checks an attribute of the user to send the email to the

right mailboxes. This is another reason why when we created the user accounts we added if the

account was Staff or Student in the department attribute.

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For this starter manual we are going to create a Distribution Group through the Exchange Control

Panel.

Click on Distribution Groups in the ECP navigation.

Click on New located in the middle of the page.

A new window will open for you to fill in information about the group. There are a lot of

requirements so ensure you have filled everything in. The email address is the email address that

can be used to email this whole group.

If there are certain users in the school who you want to be able to own this group and add users

themselves, add them to the Owners area.

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In the next section we are going to add the members of this group. Click on Add.

Search for the users you want and click Add. You can add multi users at a time if you want. The list

will only show users who have an Exchange Online license. You can also add other distribution

groups into this list if you wanted.

The next section is around Membership Approval. By default users can add themselves and leave

which we want to restrict as you don’t want students to be able to add themselves to the Staff

Group.

Change the Join permission to Closed and the Leave permission to Closed.

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When you are ready click Save which is always located at the bottom.

You will now see the group appear in the Distribution Groups list.

Create any other groups you want.

Lync Online There aren’t too many configuration changes for Lync Online but there are some important changes

that can allow Lync to be used by students with Live Messenger and talk externally with anyone if

they know their email address.

Microsoft assume that you want your Lync closed to the public so you can only talk to users who are

within your Office 365 for education tenancy and with a Lync license. There are two levels of

external communication. One is to allow it to work with other external Lync users whether they

have Office 365 for education or a locally installed on-premise installation. The other is around

Public IM where you can talk to users who have Live Messenger.

When you click on the Manage button from the Admin Portal for Lync you are taken to the Overview

page where you will be able to see the status of your settings and external connections.

As New Wave Academy are a part of a group of academies we want to be able to communicate with

just these schools and not anyone with Lync. This is known as federation. This is all managed under

the External communications tab. Click on this and a new page will load.

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As you can see both of these are disabled and we are going to keep Public IM disabled. Click on the

Edit button next to Domain federation mode.

Because we want to control who we federate with we are going to keep external communications

off except for the allowed domains.

Click OK when you have made the change.

You will notice that a new line has appeared just under the Edit button we clicked a few moments

ago. This is where we are going to add the domain we want to allow and federate with.

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Click on add a domain and type the domain name of the school you want to federate with. It is

important that you have both created all the DNS records for this to work. If you are unsure check

the settings and if you have any problems with seeing each other’s information in the Lync client, it

is most likely that the DNS is setup incorrectly.

Click on OK when you are happy and the domains will be federated from your tenancy. To complete

the process of the two schools communicating, both tenancies must add each other’s domain into

this section.

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When this is completed you will see the list of domains you are federated with.

SharePoint Online The management settings for SharePoint doesn’t really need any changes but if you are thinking of

creating additional site collections, InfoPath Forms or to manage a User’s Profile you do this through

the Admin Portal.

The Administration Centre for SharePoint will load and you will see six sections which you can use to

manage any of these features. For now we are going to go into Manage Site Collections.

Create your Public Facing Site One of the great free features of Office 365 for education is the ability to have a free public facing

internet site based on SharePoint. You can only have 1 public facing site per tenancy.

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When the page loads, click on New and the drop box will appear and select Public Website.

A new window will load and you will be asked to fill in different pieces of information. Give it a title

such as your school name and select the website address you want to use. You can add more URLs

by registering more domains in the Admin Portal. By default you will have one setup for you.

Fill in your language selection and Time Zone and enter your username to be the Administrator of

the site.

We now have two final sections to fill out which are around allocation of storage and resources.

Storage is the amount of disk space you want to use for this website. You can always increase this

later but for now enter 1000 which is almost a gigabyte of data.

Resources is about custom code. To run custom code it uses processing power. This is asking you

what processing power you want for this tenancy (per day). You don’t need any for this site as you

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don’t have any custom code but enter 200 by default and should you deploy some later you can add

more.

Click OK to complete the process and navigate to the URL you selected. Assuming the DNS is setup

correctly you will be able to see your site within minutes.

Increase your SharePoint Storage Capacity As discussed earlier, you will be allocated 500MB per license for you to use in SharePoint but by

default you will only have 1GB set for your main SharePoint site. We need to increase the default

and set this to the highest available.

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The image below has an allocation which has already been used by some site collections and as your

current environment only has 1000MB we want to increase this to the location we have for your

licenses.

Select the first site collection and select Storage Quota above it.

A window will open and you need to change the quota to 100,000MB which is the highest you can

have. From the image below you can see that there is currently 8000MB of quota available and for

this site collection I’m going to set it to 7,000MB as this is all I’m current licensed for. I’m also going

to setup the notification so that the administrators of my site collection are notified to let them

know that they have reached 90% of their allocation.

office 365 for education starter manual - bfc networks · this starter manual will give you a step...

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