Office365

Introduction

Office 365 services complement the Moodle learning platform to provide a more productive experience for teachers and students.

Features

The Office365 set of plugins provide a number of features to enhance your Moodle instance:

• Single sign on to Moodle using Office365 accounts
  • Users can sign in to Moodle using their Office365 accounts.
• Calendar sync from Moodle to Outlook
  • Users can sync site events, course events, assignment due dates, and their personal Moodle calendar to their Outlook calendar.
• OneDrive for Business repository
  • Users can access their personal OneDrive for Business documents from Moodle.
• SharePoint integration
  • You can connect your Moodle instance to a SharePoint subsite. Sites below this will be created for each course in your Moodle instance, and the document library from each course subsite is accessible through the OneDrive for Business repository. The course subsite document library is accessible by course teachers, serving as a place for teachers to share documents.
  • For more information, see Office365/SharePoint
• Office Mix support
  • Office Mixes can be embeded directly into any text and viewed within Moodle.

Requirements

To use the Office365 plugins, you need the following:

• An Office 365 subscription.
• A Microsoft Azure subscription.
• Moodle version 2.7 or above.

Plugins

The Office365 set of plugins contains 7 different plugins which work together. They are as follows:

• Office365 local plugin (local_office365)
  • This is a shell plugin which has dependencies on the current version of each of the other 6 plugins. Installing this plugin ensures you have the current version of each of the functional plugins installed.
• OpenID Connect Authentication Plugin (auth_oidc)
  • This plugin allows users to log in to Moodle using OpenID Connect. This also provides the connection to Office365. Users with existing Moodle accounts can switch to using this authentication plugin, and new users can log in with this plugin and have an account created for them. Users can also choose to disconnect from OpenID Connect and revert their login to a username/password.
• o365 local plugin (local_o365)
  • This plugin provides most of the Office365 integration back-end. This provides shared code to communicate with Office365, and powers the calendar sync.
• OneDrive for Business repository (repository_office365)
  • This is a repository plugin that communicates with OneDrive for Business. If the SharePoint link is configured (see Office365/SharePoint), this also provides access to shared course document libraries.
• o365 Profile Field (profilefield_o365)
  • This profile field provides status information on a user's Office365 connection and a link for users to manage their Office365-related preferences.
• OIDC Profile Field (profilefield_oidc)
  • This profile field provides status information on a user's OpenID Connect connection and a link for users to manage it.
• oEmbed Filter (filter_oembed)
  • This filter converts links to a variety of sites into oembed-powered interactions. This is used to embed Office Mix links directly into text.

Installation

The packages are available from:

• The Moodle Plugins directory
  • Office365 Plugin Set
• GitHub
  • https://github.com/MSOpenTech/moodle-local_office365
  • https://github.com/MSOpenTech/moodle-auth_oidc
  • https://github.com/MSOpenTech/moodle-local_o365
  • https://github.com/MSOpenTech/moodle-repository_office365
  • https://github.com/MSOpenTech/moodle-profilefield_o365
  • https://github.com/MSOpenTech/moodle-profilefield_oidc
  • https://github.com/MSOpenTech/moodle-filter_oembed

When you log back in to your Moodle instance, you are presented with the all the plugin configuration options. Since you are installing the plugins as a package there are dependencies that have not yet been enabled. Save the settings without configuring them. You will come back to them later.

For information on installing plugins in Moodle see Installing plugins

Configuration

After you have the code installed in your Moodle instance, follow the instructions at Office365/Setup to get the plugins running.

Connecting users to Office365

To use any Office365 features, a Moodle user must be connected to an Office365 user that has an active Office365 subscription. There are two ways to connect a Moodle user to an Office365 user.

1. Switch the user to use OpenID Connect authentication.

With this method, the user will log in to Moodle using their Office365 account credentials.

• Users who do not yet have a Moodle account can simply follow the normal OpenID Connect login process (see: OpenID_Connect_Authentication_Plugin#Basic_Usage). If a Moodle account is not found for a user logging in with OpenID Connect, an account will be created for them.
• To migrate an existing Moodle user to OpenID Connect authentication, see OpenID_Connect_Authentication_Plugin#Migrating_an_existing_user.

2. Link a Moodle user to an Office365 user.

Users in Moodle can also be linked to Office365 users without changing the Moodle user's authentication method. Users will be able to log in as they always have, and still use all the Office365 features.

1. As the user, visit the user's profile page.
2. Assuming all plugins are installed (specifically profilefield_o365), there should be an Office365 Connection profile field listed. It should read You are not connected to Office 365. with a link reading Connect to Office 365
3. Click Connect to Office365
4. You will be brought to the Office365 Connection Management page, where you should see a connection status section with two indicators,one for Office365 login and one for Office365 connection.
5. Click Connect to Office365 next to the Office365 Connection indicator.
6. You will be brought to the AzureAD authentication screen. Log in with the Office365 user's credentials you'd like to connect to the Moodle user you are logged in as.
7. If login was successful, you will be brought back to the Office365 Connection Management page, where the Office365 connection indicator should now read Active.
8. This user is now connected to the Office365 user.
9. To disconnect the Moodle user from the Office365 user, click the Disconnect from Office365 link that appears next to the Office365 connection indicator when the connection is active.