W11 home for small classroom

[stevepence5314 (Steve Pence)]

Setting up 5 W11 home (ugh!) clients for a small classroom. Curriculum only requires a browser and Office. Customer has purchased a 5 user MS 365 license. Each client now uses same MS account as administrator, eg teacher@foo.org. Use case for classroom is self study / tutoring, i.e. very unlikely all 5 will need 365 at once. No need to track students at the OS level. Students grab any available client, all now set to same pin.

Ordinarily I would create a non-admin local user on each machine for student use. But I understand (zero experience with 365 or home) that local users can’t access 365, so I need MS accounts e.g. student@foo.org on each client. But do I need student1 through student5@foo.org to keep 365 licensing happy? And how best to limit them? From settings I see all the “Family” stuff, but what’s really happening? No idea. I see “other user”, but what’s that, really? Users and Group is missing from Computer Management. And when I try net user, none of the MS accounts on the machine even show up! Am I blind ? Or am I supposed to be?

Thanks,

Steve

[molan]

@stevepence5314

But I understand (zero experience with 365 or home) that local users can’t access 365

Unless I missed something in your explanation this isn’t true.

MS 365 is a online service. It doesn’t care about what device or the account on the device you login from. As long as you have the valid credentials to the MS 365 account you can login and use it.

If we are talking about the Desktop apps (Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook) they authenticate the user separate from the windows login anyway.

I would create a local non admin user exactly as you described. (or wipe the machines and put Linux on them since they are to cheap to buy the proper windows OS. Windows Home is very feature “Limited” especially in user management. That is going to cause you issues, but not with MS 365 licensing.

[adrian_ych]

@stevepence5314

Setting up 5 W11 home (ugh!) clients for a small classroom. Curriculum only requires a browser and Office. Customer has purchased a 5 user MS 365 license. Each client now uses same MS account as administrator, eg teacher@foo.org. Use case for classroom is self study / tutoring, i.e. very unlikely all 5 will need 365 at once. No need to track students at the OS level. Students grab any available client, all now set to same pin.

Ordinarily I would create a non-admin local user on each machine for student use. But I understand (zero experience with 365 or home) that local users can’t access 365, so I need MS accounts e.g. student@foo.org on each client. But do I need student1 through student5@foo.org to keep 365 licensing happy? And how best to limit them? From settings I see all the “Family” stuff, but what’s really happening? No idea. I see “other user”, but what’s that, really? Users and Group is missing from Computer Management. And when I try net user, none of the MS accounts on the machine even show up! Am I blind ? Or am I supposed to be?

Thanks,

Steve

Firstly, user must never be local administrators of the machine.
Then more importantly, users MUST NEVER use administrator accounts of MS365 or other cloud or SAAS services.

Can you try creating local accounts using netplwiz ?
What I would also suggest is to

1. Create a user with password

2. Download Autologin from sysinternals so that the machines autologin using the above user account with password

3. tidy up that user profile (use decrapifer or just remove all the bloatware & crapware)

4. Login to student# (eg student1@foo.org on PC-1) and save it as bookmark and default startup on browsers. If you need paste sticker with email ID & PW on the machine.
   But in admin console, you may want to limit each of that account only to a certain machine host name (may need MDM) or some sort of 2FA (only teachers can access).

The idea is that users are not admins and users do not need to know the Windows credentials. Then you somehow need to lockdown the email accounts so that students cannot use it on their mobile or home PC etc.

For our school, we also have these “kiosk” PCs. But instead of MS365, we use MS Office 2016 & MS Office 2021 (licensing issues) with Gmail “free” where at least students can use their person email or bring what they have learnt to their lives (on creating & using own email accounts).

[matt7863 (m@ttshaw)]

The main issue facing you is that Office 365 accounts cannot be shared between users:
Here is a good overview Microsoft 365 Licensing for Shared Account - Essential Tech and a key seciton:
Compliance: Microsoft’s licensing agreement states each user who utilises its online services must have their own individual subscription license. The only exceptions are resource mailboxes, shared mailboxes, and room mailboxes.

Microsoft offer good discount schemes for education. Speak to a reseller/partner.

I would recommend using Windows 11 for education and then join them to AzureAD/Entra. then any organsiation M365 account can be used to sign in etc.

[stevepence5314 (Steve Pence)]

Duh! Obviously you are correct re the online service and I was having a brain fade.
Thanks,
Steve

[stevepence5314 (Steve Pence)]

Thanks to everyone for the suggestions. Also especially appreciate the note about Office 365 accounts not being shared between users. We are going have to re-think what we are doing and why.

Steve

[aileencjr]

There’s Office 2024 that installs to the computer. Support is for 5 years. Your request has been blocked. This could be due to several reasons.