Golden Path for Education - Part 1a

What is Golden Path

Golden Path was developed to simplify and enhance the security of deploying a Microsoft 365 tenant solution in education. It consists of three stages:

Stage 1: Deployment Guides are available online at Golden Path. This stage includes:

• Baseline - Stage 1a
• Standard - Stage 1b
• Advanced - Stage 1c

Stage 2: A Discovery/Assessment AI tool is used to expose the tenant's configuration and analyze it against the tenant's license configurations, tenant and service settings, Microsoft's general education recommendations, and customer requirements.

Stage 3: Drift Configuration management helps understand changes made against the established configuration in the tenant. These changes can be reversed or modified before any breaches or irregularities create problems.

 

 

Goals and Objectives for Golden Path

 

 

Goals

Develop prescriptive deployment guides that provide a centralized resource with education-specific scenarios to assist organizations in defining, managing, and organizing their tenant and appropriate applications.

• Reduce the overall complexity of tenant and service deployment.
• Establish baseline recommended pathways to facilitate a common and agreed-upon configuration based on subject-matter experts.
• Utilize AI technology to uncover and compare recommended settings against user requirements based on documented configurations.
• Implement phased configurations to aid customers and partners in understanding what they may not know or should consider during discovery to meet customer expectations.
• Highlight unused features and products to ensure customers fully leverage the potential and benefits of their purchased product licenses.
• Identify opportunities for partner participation in achieving customer goals and expectations based on customer requirements and Golden Path findings.
• Create an easy pathway for customer change management to enhance control, security, compliance, and privacy of tenants.
• Develop custom assessments to evaluate product entry for items such as Copilot, Defender, Purview, Intune, Zero-Trust, and Microsoft Entra ID.

Objectives

• Deliver information for features available (used/unused) to users based on license model.
• Prescriptive recommendations based on education scenarios. - Present upgrade license opportunities from A1 to A3 to A5.
• Security analysis exposing gaps and issues proactively to allow modifications before it's too late.
• Promote partner access to customers that have defined gaps based on assessments and are requesting partner assistance.
• Better discovery and assessment analysis with new tools.
• Designed to be more self-serving customer and partner access management.
• Speed up user adoption for educators and IT Admins alike.

Baseline Stage 1a

Baseline is stage 1a in the overall development of the Golden Path for Education. It is based on a majority of licenses within the tenant at the Microsoft 365 A1 for Education level. It also is a set of recommendations for ALL Microsoft Education tenants.

Navigation

Golden Path has three folders in the navigations.

1. Golden Path
2. Baseline
3. References

Golden Path folder consist of the Golden Path overall review. It goes over the entire program and the how and why it is built. Currently there are two pages, Golden Path overview and Baseline Overview.

Golden Path overview menu

Golden Path overview

1. Stages (Deployment Guides, Discovery/Assessments, Drift Management)
2. Modules (Setup, Identity, Applications, Security, and Devices)
3. Phases (Baseline(A1), Standard(A3), Advanced(A5))

Baseline Overview

1. Steps for each phase (Setup, Identity, Applications, Security, Devices)
2. Licenses that are included
3. General information links
4. List of links for all applications and products included with A1 license
5. List of links for all features included with A1 license

Baseline menu

 

Setup

Tenant setup is key to establishing a secure and valid tenant. Setup goes through domain assignment, administration, and service management.

 

 

• Overview - Review all the steps that are part of the setup phase section
• Step 1 - Create your Office 365 tenant account
• Step 2 - Configure Security Center admin settings
• Step 3 - Secure and configure your network
• Step 4 - Sync your on-premises active directory
• Step 5 - Provision users
• Step 6 - Sync SIS with School Data Sync (SDS)
• Step 7 - License Users

 

Identity

Establishing an identity via Microsoft Entra ID and establishing authentication methods, Single Sign-On, and user procurement methodologies.

 

 

• Overview - Review all steps that are a part of the identity phase
• Step 1 - Understand identity definitions
• Step 2 - Configure Microsoft Entra ID basics
• Step 3 - Consider education identity steps
• Step 4 - Consider identity applications
• Step 5 - Set up access to operation services
• Step 6 - Set up identity lifecycle
• Step 7 - Configure security in identity
• Step 8 - Manage access controls

 

Applications

Applications like Microsoft Teams, SharePoint, OneDrive, Exchange Online are the core to a Microsoft tenant. Getting these applications setup are essential to allowing users in education to access services and apps like Learning Accelerators.

 

• Overview - Review all steps that are a part of the application phase
• Exchange Online

o   Step 1 - Design an Exchange Online environment

o   Step 2 - Set up Exchange Online

o   Step 3 - Configure compliance and security in Exchange Online

o   Step 4 - Configure address books, shared mailboxes, and clients

• Microsoft Teams

o   Overview - What is Microsoft Teams for Education

o   Step 1 - Configure Microsoft Teams for Education

o   Step 2 - Configure Microsoft Teams policies and settings for education organization

• OneDrive/SharePoint - Overview

o   Step 1 - Plan your OneDrive and SharePoint Deployment

o   Step 2 - Share within OneDrive and SharePoint

o   Step 3 - Configure security and access controls in OneDrive and SharePoint

o   Step 4 - Compliance considerations with OneDrive and SharePoint

 

Security and Compliance

Security via each phase is essential to maintaining order and blocking access for bad actors. Along with security compliance/privacy considerations that are established to adhere to a multitude of local and government requirements worldwide.

• Overview
• Step 1 - Security Considerations

 

Devices

Managed and unmanaged devices are another key to helping secure the network and potential cyber-security considerations that enter the network via these devices.

 

• Overview
• Step 1 - Review device management structure
• Step 2 - Plan device management
• Step 3 - Configure settings and applications
• Step 4 - Deploy and manage devices
• Windows 11 features and tips

References menu

• Mulit-tenant solutions - Architectural recommendations base on multi or large tenant solutions.
• Accessibility
• Deploy Office 365 applications
• Pooled storage management

How do you use Golden Path?

Golden Path uses deployment guidelines content that contain education scenario specifics.

Golden Path has a linked path for each modules based on the phase (Baseline,Standard,Advanced).

Users can follow the deployment content to establish or redefine the tenant configuration in order to enable additional services and products.

What’s Next

Go to https://aka.ms/gp4edu to access the first part of Golden Path.

Part 1b (Standard -A3 content) NEXT

Part 1c (Advanced – A5 content)

Part 2 - We will create a mechanism to discover the tenant configuration settings and allow customers and partners the ability to qualify what is set to standard recommendation. Using AI to deliver user requirements against the configuration will allow additional paths to enable services and features that allow the user/customer to achieve their objectives.

Part 3 – Deliver drift management solution for management of unrealized or understood changes that need to be approved or modified.