Technology and Computing

  • 4/10 UConn moving to Office 365; upgrading Outlook

    UITS, in concert with our IT Technical Partners, is making Microsoft Office 365 available to all UConn faculty, staff and students.

    What is Office 365?
    Office 365 is a hosted suite of software, services, and capabilities, available as part of our existing enterprise relationship with Microsoft. It provides familiar communication and collaboration services, such as email, calendar, file sharing, online conferencing, and instant messaging, via a contemporary cloud-based platform. It also includes access to Office Online, Microsoft applications (e.g., Word, Excel, PowerPoint) that you can access from almost any device with a browser and Internet connection. Other benefits of Office 365 include:

    • Unlimited online storage on OneDrive
    • Enhanced mobile connectivity
    • Advanced document sharing with simultaneous writing and editing capabilities
    • 50GB mailbox size

    Who will have access?
    All faculty, staff, and students at UConn will have free access to the services and Office Online products available on Office 365.


    What will change?
    If you are a faculty or staff member with a mailbox on the central email service, your email and calendar will be migrated to Office 365 starting Friday, April 10th at 5:00 p.m. and concluding the morning of April 13th. Typical accounts will experience a five to ten minute outage sometime during the migration window.  Mail will continue to be delivered during this short outage, even though your mailbox will be temporarily unavailable.

    Once you have been migrated, how you login to Outlook will change. Today, you login using your NetID username and NetID password. After the migration, you will continue to use your NetID password but will enter your official university email address for your username instead of your NetID username. If you are unsure of your official university email address, check the UConn phonebook at http://phonebook.uconn.edu/.

    Not everyone’s email will change; only faculty and staff with central email accounts will be migrated to Office 365. Student email will remain on Google.

    What do I need to do to prepare for the migration?
    For Windows user, UITS recommends upgrading to the 2013 Office suite before April 10th and is coordinating this upgrade through our managed workstation program and with local IT support staff. We recommend that Mac users run Outlook 2011 and upgrade their operating system to OS X 10.10. Visit officeupdate.uconn.edu to download latest version of Office for Mac: 2011. For questions about your operating system, contact your local IT support staff.

    Questions
    Visit http://office365.uconn.edu/ for additional information, detailed instructions, and current news.

    For more information, contact: Josh Boggis at josh.boggis@uconn.edu