In the last 6 months I’ve had the pleasure to work with many organizations on their migration to O365 and their use of OneNote Classroom for Faculty and Students.

I’ll share some of my experiences and a sneak peek about what’s ahead.

One of the biggest challenges I’ve seen is the storage of the “Class Notebook” as of now, when a teacher creates a Class Notebook, this OneNote is stored in the teachers private OneDrive for Business document library in O365.

Example: https://kfskole-my.sharepoint.com/personal/jimmy_kfskole_onmicrosoft_com

With this behavior we’re getting two major challenges:

1. What happens if the teachers resigns, and starts in a new place?

• As default, when a user resigns, their user account is disabled and licenses reasigned, what happens is that their OneDrive for Business and all contents gets deleted after 30 days grace. No saying the Class Notebook is also deleted.

 

1. What happens if the teacher change class or change position?

• The teaches is still in the organisasjon, but their position has changed, there is actually no easy way to transfer the Class Notebook to the new teacher, keeping the history and URL changes. Although moving Notebooks around in OneDrive is improved with the “Durable Links” feature updates.
• Besides to move the Class notebook to a new teacher you will need write permissions to that teachers OneDrive.

 

A solution to this is on the way, say hello to “Classroom“

The new Classroom experience is actually a O365 Group containing:

• Exchange Online Mailbox
• Exchange Online Calendar
• Class Notebook
• Files | a SharePoint team site collection to store files

Teachers can now create Class Notebook here and share other files, content will be stored in the Classroom document library. Making teacher changes way easier and we don’t need to worry about content getting deleted because of staff changes.

Since this is a Group, what we get is a hidden SharePoint Site Collection in the backend, with a document library for files.

The classrom Notebook is stored in the “Assets Library” of the Groups SharePoint site.

The big difference is where the Class Notebooks are stored.

With this and other features like Forms, Yammer, Classroom Mobile App planned for O365, collaboration between Administration, Faculty and Students is getting easier than ever.