As well as proplus the Office for students offer is also going to cause headaches
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ukschools/archive/2013/10/15/microsoft-offers-students-at-eligible-educational-institutions-access-to-full-office-productivity-suite-for-no-additional-cost.aspx

this looks like it is going to be offered  as a download in the office365 website rather than via the kivuto "onthehub" portal.   

We have been very successful in using shibboleth to access Dreamspark  and Dreamspark premium via "onthehub",  our ability to provide Dreamspark premium to our STEM qualifying users and Dreamspark standard to out other users by setting the right attributes has greatly enhanced our institutional uptake.  Since January our users have downloaded over £2.5 million worth of software for free.      The biggest lesson we have learned from this is that simplifying the user experience, by doing all the access control heavy lifting in an automated  transparent  to the user fashion,   is  key to driving uptake. 
The office offer is would be a complimentary offer, Dreamspark premium gives access to everything bar office.   Together they would be of real significant benefit to our users.   

However if office is only offered via 365 we are going to have a complicated user experience  of telling people to get one set of Microsoft software via one simple route and another via a complex route, the download software section in office 365 looks to be quite convoluted to get to.  Our experience has shown us that a complicated user experience hurts uptake, even on an offer with a very obvious benefit to the end user.       We have the added complication that only our taught students are on office365   our research students are still on internal email, so we will not be able to grant them access. 

Ideally we would like to see one place to get software with a nice simple user interface.  The onthehub system accessed via shibboleth is working well for us,   making the offers available via that would be our much  preferred option.   If Microsoft's goal is to drive uptake of it's products in the student population then our experience demonstrates that a simple user experience where are the weird teiring of  different levels of access happens magically in the background is key.   This is much easier to achieve with shib based federation.   

Cal



  

>-----Original Message-----
>From: Discussion list for Shibboleth developments [mailto:JISC-
>[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Matthew Slowe
>Sent: 04 November 2013 15:20
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Fwd: [OFFICE365-MANAGERS] Office "ProPlus" and Shibboleth
>
>All,
>
>Apologies for cross-posting this. For those of you who use Office365 with
>Shibboleth as the federation model and aren't on the (rather new) Office365-
>Managers list, could you take a moment to read the below?
>
>Thanks,
>Matthew
>
>Begin forwarded message:
>
>> From: Matthew Slowe <[log in to unmask]>
>> Subject: Re: [OFFICE365-MANAGERS] Office "ProPlus" and Shibboleth
>> Date: 1 November 2013 12:45:14 GMT
>> To: <[log in to unmask]>
>>
>> On Fri, Oct 25, 2013 at 12:28:21PM +0100, Matthew Slowe wrote:
>>> Afternoon all,
>>>
>>> Does any one have any idea if the forthcoming Office ProPlus
>>> service (free-for-all) works if one is federating using Shibboleth
>>> rather than ADFS?
>>>
>>> A colleague recently asked an MSFT (I suspect) Sales guy and he
>>> apparently mumbled something "of course it will" but I have my
>>> suspicions given than Lync and Office+Sharepoint integration don't.
>>
>> Having spoken to James at MSFT, it seems that my fears were correct in
>> that Office ProPlus will not be supported with Shibboleth as a
>> Federation model.
>>
>> He has asked for some indication from the community as to how many users
>> this is likely to affect so that a case can, potentially, be made for
>> getting this looked at.
>>
>> While on the subject, some indication of who is using Shibboleth and
>> wanting to use the other unsupported systems (Lync, Sharepoint
>> integration...) but unable to do so because of this limitation might be
>> useful, too :)
>>
>> If you'd rather not email the list directly, please just send it to me
>> and I'll collate any responses I get before next Friday (8-Nov) for
>> James.
>>
>>
>> For us, I'd estimate the affected user count on both sides to be in the
>> region of 25,000.
>
>--
>Matthew Slowe
>Server Infrastructure Team      e: [log in to unmask]
>IS, University of Kent          t: +44 (0)1227 824265
>Canterbury, UK                  w: www.kent.ac.uk