If you or others from your college/university will be attending the Educause Conference in Indianapolis, please be sure to find the Microsoft booth in the expo area.

https://www.educause.edu/annual-conference

Enabling Technologies will be showing off Skype for Business and Office 365 Cloud Services in the Level 3 booth, so be sure to visit them as well.

Windows in Higher Education Conference | Oct 12-14 in Bellevue WA at the Microsoft Advanta Campus. This is a technical conference with sessions and content focus on infrastructure technologies such as Windows Server and Windows Client, systems management, virtualization, and security, and also service provider technologies like messaging, collaboration and application platforms. Registration site and agenda forthcoming. All Higher Ed customers are eligible to attend even if they are not part of the Windows in Higher Education listserv.

You are encouraged to join the listserv for free at http://www.windows-hied.org/.

Here is the blog posting: http://blogs.technet.com/b/machinelearning/archive/2015/06/04/ml-predicts-high-school-dropout-risk-boosts-graduation-rates.aspx

Please join Microsoft & AzureFirst for an instructor-led webinar. This interactive, 200-level technical discussion, and demo is offered on Wednesday, June 17 at 12:30 pm Eastern. Please grab your lunch and come listen into the webinar. This webinar will:

• Provide an overview of Microsoft Azure Infrastructure as a Service
• Demo an Azure IaaS Virtual Machine being created
• Demo Site Recovery Services - fail over of on-premises VMware workloads to Microsoft Azure

This session will focus on standing up Virtual Machines in Microsoft Azure and Site Recovery Services. We will not be covering other aspects of Azure services such as PaaS, Azure websites, and SQL services (for example)

in this particular session. Stay tuned for future webinars!!

More details and registration info here: https://clicktoattend.microsoft.com/en-us/Pages/EventDetails.aspx?EventID=209010

Presented By http://azurefirst.com/

In the meantime, you can access much of the content from Ignite online.  Here’s some of the presentations and other related blog posts:

· https://channel9.msdn.com/events/Ignite/2015/BRK2104

· http://blogs.office.com/2015/05/04/sway-announces-office-365-and-languages/

· http://blogs.office.com/2015/04/17/the-philosophy-behind-focus-points-in-sway/

· http://blogs.office.com/2015/04/02/sway-is-now-collaborative-create-and-edit-together-with-others/

· http://blogs.office.com/2015/04/02/more-background-on-building-collaboration-into-sway/

Register here and take advantage of academic pricing and early registration discounts.

• December 1 - 4, 2014
• Speakers at Azure IaaS for IT Pros Online Event 

Join Mark Russinovich, Microsoft Chief Technology Officer, Azure, as he kicks off a week of Azure training for IT Professionals.  Over the course of four days, Senior Technical Evangelist Rick Claus and members of Azure Engineering deep dive into the technologies critical for IT Pro Implementers, like you, to help better understand and build your foundational cloud skills.  Experts will share their deep technical insights on these topics which will also prepare you to take Exam 70-533: Implementing Microsoft Azure Infrastructure Solutions for Microsoft Azure Specialist Certification.

Topics include:

·       Day 1:  Establish the Foundation: Core IaaS Infrastructure Technical Fundamentals

·       Day 2:  Dive Deep into Networking, Storage and Disaster Recovery Scenarios

·       Day 3:  Embrace Open Source Technologies (Chef and Puppet Configurations, Containerization with

Docker, and Linux) to Accelerate and Scale Solutions

·       Day 4:  Optimize Windows Workload Architecture and Administration Capabilities Within Azure

Register through Microsoft Virtual Academy to receive reminder mails for this event and to obtain details for receiving a voucher for 50 percent off the exam price if taken by January 31^st. Join the conversation on Twitter using #LevelUpAzure.

To Register, go to https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/Microsoft-Azure/Level-Up-Azure-IaaS-for-IT-Pros. 

Agenda Highlights:

• Keynote speaker, Bill Taylor, Founding Editor of Fast Company, will discuss his project, Practically Radical, Not-So-Crazy Ways to Transform Your Company, Shake Up Your Industry, and Challenge Yourself, based on in-depth access to 25 organizations that are making deep-seated changes under the most trying circumstances imaginable.
• Former Director of the National Counterterrorism Center, now Head of Global Government & Cyber Operations for Palantir Technologies, Michael Leiter will discuss how to lead through disruption, and impacts of technological change.
• Jay Vijayan, CIO of Tesla Motors, will join Judson Althoff, President North America, Microsoft, for a fire side chat about how Tesla has Reimagined their Enterprise through innovation and disruption.

Registration URL – https://aka.ms/cio_bloggers

Last year Microsoft announced a benefit for students that gave them access to an Office 365 ProPlus subscription if their school purchases Office for all faculty and staff.

Since then, we heard a lot from students, educators and school IT departments that:

• Many are excited for all students and educators to work toward learning outcomes using the latest versions of familiar Office programs like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote and more, across devices they use every day.
• Microsoft could make it easier to provision users, order and assign licenses for Office 365 ProPlus, SharePoint and OneDrive for business.

As a result of this feedback Microsoft is announcing Office 365 ProPlus benefits for students immediately - and - coming in December for educators and staff. These benefits add flexibility in how to provide these services to your education community.

How does it work?

Students (and soon educators/staff) who have an email address from your school can sign themselves up from Office.com/GetOffice365 and get:

• Office 365 ProPlus: Applications like Word, PowerPoint, Excel and more on up to 5 PCs and Macs and up to 5 mobile devices (such as iPads, iPhones and Android phones)
• OneDrive for business with 1TB of cloud storage that can be synchronized for use when offline.

Students who already have an Office 365 account can use their existing user name and password. If you have not assigned licenses to students, one will be automatically assigned to them when they sign in. 

You continue to control managing the services in a manner that fits for your organization. Microsoft is providing you with a set of 1M licenses for your students at no additional cost. You have the option of assigning these licenses yourself through the Office 365 admin portal, or you can do nothing and students will be able to sign up themselves and activate the licenses automatically when a student uses the self-sign up website. The availability of these licenses does not impact any preferences previously set on license assignment.

The benefits of allowing students (and soon educators/staff) to sign up on their own is that you save time because you do not have to provision users by ordering and assigning licenses for Office 365 ProPlus. Self-sign up is a fast way to enable your educational community to access these benefits immediately.

If you need to, this FAQ articulates how to take control of the self-provisioning of students, faculty and staff, or the assignment of licenses.

There are no administrative actions your institution needs to take to enable these new self-sign-up and auto licensing features. Simply communicate the availability to your students using our student marketing kit at Office.com/GetOffice365Resources. (Faculty resources coming soon!)