What is Office 365?
The name “Office 365” is used to refer to two things:
- Office 365 is a frequently updated set of productivity applications that you install on you computer or mobile device (you are probably familiar with them – Outlook, Word, Excel and Powerpoint). We’ll refer to this as the Office 365 suite.
- Office 365 is Microsoft’s cloud which has many services, including Exchange Online (for email), Sharepoint Online (Sharepoint is the basis of OURDrive), and Teams. We’ll refer to this as the Office 365 service.
When is Office 365 coming?
Office 365 services are rolling out to staff during 2020. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the rollout of some Office 365 services, particularly Microsoft Teams, was accelerated. Teams and some other Office 365 services (e.g. Word/Excel/Powerpoint Online) should now be available to everyone.
Other components of the Office 365 rollout will occur during 2020 – the two major pieces are migration of staff mailboxes from Exchange (running in our datacentres) to Exchange Online, and the migration of data from Syncplicity to OneDrive for Business
When do I have to go to Office 365?
As suggested above, you may already be using some parts of Office 365. Some computers around campus have had their Office suites updated to the Office 365 versions.
We’ll be in contact prior to mailbox migrations to Exchange Online.
Why do I want my mailbox moved to Office 365?
- Larger Mailbox (100GB)
- Access your calendar within Teams calendar app
- Access to To-Do (to-do list with assignable tasks)
- Improved mail security options, better retroactive spam/malware detection
- Better data compliance options in future, such as the ability to label emails as sensitive
- Ability to open shared mailboxes on mobile devices
- Better webmail experience
- Better collaboration with students
What are the other benefits to the Office 365 suite?
There are many! Here’s a few…
- View your own or others position within the organisation via the Org Chart view within Teams
- Create lists of tasks in Microsoft To Do and share with others
- Tasks (Planner) allows your team to create plans, assign out tasks and chart their progress. It also integrates with Microsoft Teams.
- Teams is a workspace for real-time collaboration and communication. Teams allows users to share files, co-author files in real time, chat, audio or video conference, screen share and much more including integrating with other apps and workflows.
- Increased security offered by the platform to protect you and your data including Safe Links, Safe Attachments and Mult Factor Authentication (MFA) which has significantly reduced our number of compromised accounts.
- Improved spam handling resulting in less junk and fewer compromised accounts
- OneDrive, is a cloud storage platform with sync and share features to replace Syncplicity. Its starting storage capacity is 2 TB and includes security features such as cloud-based antivirus scanning of it’s contents while leveraging the Multi Factor Authentication of the Office 365 suite.
- One of the great benefits of Office 365 is the home use benefit allowing you to install the Microsoft Office applications on up to five machines. These can include your home computer or running office on mobile devices.
- “Always current” versions of the Office suite applications
