Dear UP Campus Members,
As part of ongoing efforts to enhance communication and increase collaboration, the Information Services Department will soon provide Microsoft Office 365 Cloud Services to all students, faculty, and staff. The Office 365 Suite of products is an integrated set of tools intended to seamlessly allow communication between individuals and groups across stationary and mobile platforms. It includes cloud email and calendaring, file sharing and collaboration tools such as OneDrive and Skype, as well as online and client versions of Microsoft Office Applications.
With the input of key users across campus representing teaching and learning, administrative staff and students, who invested time in evaluation and testing, the Advisory Council for Enterprise Services (ACES) approved a proposal to move forward with an Office 365 Collaboration Suite implementation program.
What this means to the University community is increased access to email, calendar, contacts, files, and documents from anywhere using your phone, tablet, laptop or desktop. In addition, implementing Office 365 will enable students, faculty and staff to collaborate with each other. Data is centrally located, so if you have a document you would like a select group of individuals to collaborate on, it can be shared with the group for real time simultaneous editing (colleagues can even add comments as they edit).
If you are a faculty member, you will now have the ability to create assignments and activities for you and your students to work collaboratively on documents using a University resource. These opportunities can be both synchronous and asynchronous and include the entire suite of Microsoft tools. Skype (formerly Lync) will enhance your ability to communicate with students using video and chat and allow you to bring outside guests into your classroom using a common video conferencing tool.
If you are a student, you will now have the ability to share documents and collaborate with anyone in the UP community. OneDrive will also become a document repository behind Moodle so that you can upload assignments directly from OneDrive to an assignment in Moodle, enhancing the way you work on mobile devices. Just like with Gmail and Google Drive, you will be able to access email and shared documents from all your devices and your UP email address will not change.
Implementation of our Office 365 Portal will begin late this summer for faculty and staff with training available at the start of fall semester. Student onboarding will align with the start of spring semester to allow for the migration of email from Gmail inboxes to the new Office 365 Email. When a student accesses their Office 365 Email for the first time in the spring, they will see all the email that was in their Gmail inbox. All new email will route to Office 365 and no new email will be accepted to the Gmail inbox thereafter. Information about the coordination of the transition of other Google applications, such as documents, will be forthcoming.
More detailed project communications and instructions for students on the migration process will be provided in the coming months.
For information about Office 365 features and benefits, the project timeline, as well as answers to frequently asked questions, please visit the Office 365 Project website at sites.up.edu/office365.
We thank all students, faculty, and staff who participated in the Office 365 demo and for their valuable input. We are excited to offer a collaboration solution to the entire campus community.
Sincerely,
Advisory Council for Enterprise Services
ACES Members:
Thomas G. Greene, University Provost
Rev. Gerard J. Olinger, C.S.C., Vice President for Student Affairs
Laurie C. Kelley, Vice President for University Relations
Alan P. Timmins, Vice President for Financial Affairs
James B. Ravelli, Vice President for University Operations
Curtis Pederson, Chief Information Officer
Lisel Stancil, Director of Web and Enterprise Services (ex-officio member)
Ann Harris, Associate Director of Program Management (ex-officio member)
Sam Williams, Director of Academic Technology Services (consulting)
Michelle Sunderland, Director of Technical Services (consulting)