Burke Egner, the director of technology at Austin Public Schools has just taken to the Microsoft Office Blog to tell the world the story of how his school district adopted Office 365.
According to Burke, the story all began when the teachers asked for more flexible tools, easier network access, and better communication with colleagues and students. Office 365, claims Burke, accomplished just this and a decision was made in June of 2015 to adopt the Microsoft service. Soon, district leadership wanted network accounts and email addresses for all 4,800 students and 650 faculties and staff to be up and running by the start of school on August 28. Lo and behold, the adoption became a race against time and Burke ended up engaging the Microsoft FastTrack team for support, which helped him access internal systems and identify hurdles.
Austin Public Schools team
Tony Campbell, the network administrator at Austin Public Schools, worked was one of the individuals who worked with FastTrack to deploy Microsoft Active Directory Federation Service (ADFS). FastTrack helped Campbell’s team update an outdated Exchange Server 2007 messaging environment and then migrate 650 existing email accounts with almost no trouble.
Ultimately, though, Egner could not have been more satisfied, as he writes in the blog,
“The FastTrack team didn’t just cut us loose when the migration was over,” says Egner. “They helped us plan our entire project, pointed us to the right deployment tools and provided training and adoption resources that helped us realize the full potential of Office 365. We still go back to FastTrack even now for more tools and resources.”
So, what do you think of this experience? Is it similar to that of Burke? Has your school or educational institution adopted Office 365 or Windows 10? Let us know by dropping us a comment below!
Further reading: Education, FastTrack, Microsoft, Office 365, Office 365 Education
