Updated Documentation For M365 Education
I have done a lot of live demos over the last couple of months to customers, partners, school leaders and IT admins. I have found that one of the best ways to prepare for these is to ensure I'm following best practice direct from the source. In my case this is the official Microsoft Education documentation.
For those that have been paying attention, the fairly recent addition of "Education" to the front page of the Microsoft Docs website is a big deal and shows how serious the Education sector is and remains for Microsoft:
This week, those documents received an overall update to reflect the new Microsoft 365 Education (M365) offerings and this is split into five sections:
Perhaps the biggest overall has been to the IT Admin Deployment Overview Guide which has a strong focus on all the things I've been live demo'ing of late: Managing Windows 10 through Cloud Deployment and pushing the best applications and tools for teachers. There is a scaled approach here too, with more advanced topics for IT admins that have moved well beyond the basics of modern cloud deployment. For example, I had a school reach out to me earlier this week asking for assistance with setting up Exchange Online - there is now improved documentation for that linked directly from the M365 Edu Documentation e.g.:
- Set up Exchange Online
- Migrate SharePoint On-Prem content to the cloud
- Configure Hybrid Skype For Business
My Point of View:
The reality is that products evolve and change constantly. It is virtually impossible for IT admins (let alone teachers) to keep up with the rapid release of new features in products as release cycles get shorter and shorter. Consequently, knowing the source of the best documentation becomes incredibly important and it is pleasing to see that the Microsoft Docs continues to evolve and update just as rapidly as the products themselves.
Without exaggeration, I probably come back to this website every other day for various reasons and if you're an IT Admin managing any of the M365 Edu solutions then this should be a favourite in all your web browsers!