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Education edition of 365-can admins see my files/what I'm doing?

Anonymous
2015-10-05T15:56:31+00:00

So Microsoft is now giving away free Office 365 accounts to Faculty/Staff/Students at Universities, which is awesome! 

This is probably a dumb question, but...  Is it possible for admins or others at my school to see what I'm doing when I use Office on my own PC?

It seems like they can see the OneDrive account associated with the account I set up, but I'm not actually using that account, I'm continuing to sign in with my personal Microsoft account I was already using.

Admins at my school can apparently choose whether we get updates to Office fast or slow (we're on slow, so we don't get Office 2016 until next year, I guess), so I'm just kind of worried-what else can they do?  By using this, I'm not somehow letting anyone else "see" what's on my PC, or what I'm typing in Word, or what's on my *personal* OneDrive account, right?  They can only "see" what's in the OneDrive account associated with the account I set up with my university's email? (Which I'm not actually using right now.)

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  1. Anonymous
    2015-10-06T08:26:41+00:00

    Hello,

    Thank you for posting your query on Microsoft Office Community.

    I understand your concern and I’ll assist you with this.

    I`d like to inform you that only you can access your files in OneDrive unless you share it with others.

    If you have further questions related to this issue, please let me know.

    Thank you.

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  2. Anonymous
    2015-10-06T08:54:44+00:00

    As far as I know, the administrators cannot read the files in your OneDrive or on your hard drive.

    Office 2013/365 introduced a tool called "Telemetry" for administrators.  It does monitor some things, but apparently not document content.

    Here are a couple of links that provide more specific info

    New Office telemetry poster and compatibility guide in the Office 2013 Resource Kit

    We’ve published a new Visio poster and article about compatibility and telemetry in Office 2013.

    http://searchenterprisedesktop.techtarget.com/tip/Office-Telemetry-reports-on-Office-2013-docs-and-apps

    <snip>

    The new Telemetry program collects information such as file names, usernames, computer names, computer architectures, dates and times, user counts and Office versions. The Office 2013 Telemetry feature also collects data such as success rates, load times and compatibility.

    </snip>

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  3. Anonymous
    2015-10-07T05:52:11+00:00

    As I understand it, what they can see is limited to the the file names you access using Office 365 applications.

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  4. Anonymous
    2015-10-06T16:02:50+00:00

    Thanks!  Huh...well that's good if no one can see document contents, but still creepy if someone can read my document file names that are stored on my personal PC.

    If that's the case I guess I'll need to remove it :-(

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  5. Anonymous
    2015-10-07T13:27:04+00:00

    That's on your personal PC?  Even if you're not logging in to an associated online account?  Thanks, yeah that alone makes me nervous.

    Hopefully uninstalling it will get rid of any connection there, and hopefully my personal Microsoft account isn't somehow associated now with this one I set up for my school :-/

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