Right now we are a smaller organization that already has free domain email hosting set up through Microsoft Live@edu which is being phased out to Office 365 by 9/2013. Office 365 email hosting does the same things as Google Apps does, email, calendars, online productivity suite, online storage, and chat. It would makes sense to me that your product would benefit from having a broader integration with more domain email hosts and save future Populi Customers money and time.
15 comments
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Christopher Heady Here's a link showing Microsofts free Office 365 for Education hosting:
http://www.microsoft.com/liveatedu/office365.aspx?locale=en-US&country=US
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Christopher Heady Here's another link:
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/office365/education/compare-plans.aspx
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Jonathon Beeke This would be a real plus!
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Sam Horowitz Frankly we are growing more and more frustrated with Google. I would love the option to switch, but I haven't been able to get Populi and Office 365/Azure Active Directory to speak to each other yet (I don't think it's possible with the functionality each provides right now).
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James Hi Sam,
We have several mac users here at Populi, and aren't too thrilled ourselves at the workaround currently required to make Mac Mail work with Google Apps...
I just wanted to mention that you could always hook up Populi to authenticate against Azure's cloud-hosted Active Directory or else a locally-hosted Active Directory cluster. That does mean that you'd need to pay for some flavor of Active Directory (which isn't cheap - I've heard Azure is a couple thousand per month in most cases). At any rate, if you told Populi to authenticate against your own Active Directory store, presumably you could also tell Office 360 to authenticate there as well?
There are downsides, of course - for one thing, Populi can no longer send welcome emails and have new users choose a password and log in immediately (that's because we don't manage user credentials anymore but instead ask Active Directory whether someone can log in). So you'd have to come up with a process for simultaneously creating new accounts in both Populi and Active Directory.
So if things get too painful with Google, it is possible to switch - we already have quite a few clients using Azure/Active Directory.
Thanks!
James
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Vahe Petrossian Having Office 365 integration as an option vs only Google Apps would be great. Our institution and many others are getting a lot of value out of the Microsoft offering. The current version of Office 365 is a very competitive product that has or will disrupt Google's offering in the education industry.
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Robert Frankel We use Office 365 and an integration would be great.
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David Mize Any updates on this? Microsoft is really gaining ground at the enterprise, and education level. I'd even be happy with a Microsoft "connector" that would allow Populi and O365 to communicate / show certain info. Here's some more info on connectors.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/
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Nathanael Schey using office 365 for education, and would love integration with it
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David Mize Any updates on this? We have been able to pull xml data from the Populi API and parse that with Microsoft Flow in order to do a few items related to O365. But I still would really like to see some official O365 integration.
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Sam Horowitz David what kind of stuff are you doing with the API and Flow?
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David Mize We’re able to call things like getTermStudent, and getPerson, parse the xml, and push it to a sharepoint list. From there the possibilities are endless. You could make anything there into a PowerApp etc…
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Seth Huckstead How can we make this happen? I've had it working in the past with some middle ware, but I don't want to keep throwing money at updating it. I'd contribute development costs to this as it takes hours and hours to add students to AD, even with CSV importing. I'd love to have it sync with Azure AD, automate account creation and sort students into containers and groups. What about developing on MSFT school data sync?
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Mike Turico Any updates on this? We are using office 365 for education, and would love integration with it.
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Chris Nelson We would love this as well.