Microsoft Office 365 (Email and Office Cloud Applications)

About the Service

Lancashire County Council Education Digital Services offers a range of cloud-based Office Suite and communication tools, delivered using the appropriate products within Microsoft Office 365 Education. This service provides:

  • email, including group calendars and mobile device integration
  • the use of your own school domain name
  • collaboration services
  • online Microsoft Office suite
  • online storage service (OneDrive)
  • encrypted emails for schools using Microsoft Office 365 Education
  • the use of your Office 365 username and passwords with other services
  • the setup of Microsoft 365 SSO (Single Sign-On) functionality (upon request)
  • password writeback (available to those with specific licensing and Microsoft 365 SSO setup)

What are the benefits?

  • Cloud based services minimise the need for onsite IT infrastructure to provide these services
  • Reduces costs linked to providing onsite hardware and support
  • All data is held securely in the Microsoft cloud platform, while being accessible from any Microsoft supported PC, tablet, smartphone or web browser
  • Provides access to Microsoft online Office Suite and communication tools, essential to school administration
  • Allows staff and students to work on Office files anywhere in real time; create, store and share documents, spreadsheets and presentations online
  • Allows you to access email, shared calendars and contacts from your PC, smartphone or tablet in school, at home or on the move
  • Enabling encrypted email, allows schools to send official or personal information to other individuals or organisations securely, assisting schools in complying with legislation on data security
  • Microsoft 365 Single Sign-On (SSO) setup, which allows you to access your online applications and services, such as Microsoft OneDrive, without entering further credentials
  • Password writeback (available to those with specific licensing), which allows synchronisation of passwords, therefore allowing users to reset their password for Microsoft 365 apps (e.g. email account) and have this automatically reset their domain user account password to match
  • Accounts and data can be secured using the recommended Microsoft Multifactor Authentication (MFA)

What's Included?

Feature Description

Email
  • Business class email through a rich and familiar Microsoft Outlook experience, which you can access from a web browser using Outlook Web App or using Microsoft Outlook on your computer or device
  • Includes a 50GB mailbox per user and ability to send attachments up to 150MB

Microsoft Office online apps
  • Create and edit Word (word processing), Excel (spreadsheets), PowerPoint (presentations) and OneNote (Notes) online via a web browser
OneDrive
  • OneDrive gives each school 100TB of work-related storage which they can access from anywhere and that syncs with their PC
  • Easily share files internally and externally and control who sees and edits them

Teams / Skype for Business

  • (Instant Messaging collaboration) gives users access to presence (ability to see if people are online or available), instant messaging, audio and video calling, media rich online meetings, and extensive web conferencing capabilities

SharePoint Online
  • Share information easily - SharePoint sites provide workspaces with customisable security settings for individual teams within the school
  • Popular with school management staff to collaborate on documents

Service Features

Feature Description

Documentation
  • Microsoft online How-To-Guides, FAQs, videos and tutorials for all service components
  • Provision of guides to support administration users and individual email users

Administration
  • Ability to manage user licencing and credentials

Multifactor Authentication (MFA)
  • Multi-Factor Authentication (Conditional Access) is recommended for further securing user accounts and data. This should be enabled for all staff accounts and is required to onboard to any Education Digital Services cloud platforms, such as SIMS NextGen

Storage (OneDrive)
  • 100TB of pooled cloud storage per school (OneDrive) that can be securely accessed from anywhere
  • Easily share documents with others inside and outside your organisation and control who can see and edit each file

Email recovery
  • Deleted emails within Microsoft Office 365 Education can be recovered by the user for up to 14 days, unless they are permanently deleted from the deleted items folder
  • Recover deleted users and mailboxes for up to 30 days after deletion

Email administration
  • Your school's User Management Administrator for Microsoft Office 365 Education will be able to create and manage individual and group mailboxes, for pupils and staff as required

Email security
  • up-to-date and secure data
  • Exchange online mailboxes are replicated to multiple databases in separate Microsoft data centres
  • The multiple data centres provide replication and high availability for each other (this means that in a worst-case scenario, if a Microsoft data centre becomes unavailable, you can still access your data and functionality and, in most cases, you won't even notice the difference)
  • All data and communications are highly encrypted between Microsoft data centres and between Microsoft Office 365 Education tenancies
  • premium anti-malware protection and anti-spam filtering

Encrypted email for Office 365
  • Secure email using encryption to recipients outside the school's tenancy using Office Mail Encryption (OME)

Data security
  • Microsoft Office 365 Education is the first major business productivity public cloud service to have implemented the rigorous set of physical, logical, process and management controls defined by ISO 27001

Microsoft 365 SSO (Single Sign-On)
  • Allows users to access their online Microsoft 365 applications without entering further credentials, logging in on a school login device
  • Microsoft 365 SSO provides a simpler and easier sign-in experience by reducing or eliminating sign-in prompts
  • Assists your school to transition to using Microsoft cloud applications

Password writeback for schools with A3 or A5 licences

  • Used alongside SSO, allows users to reset their password for Microsoft 365 apps (e.g. email account) and have this automatically reset their domain user account password to match (Only available to schools that subscribe to the A3 or A5 licences)
  • Makes it easier to manage the use of Microsoft cloud applications

Microsoft 365 Consultancy Services
(Add-on services)

Education Digital Services provide a range of consultancies to help schools with the setup of Microsoft Office 365 and to make more use of features. These include: