Day 11 – Things are always at their best in the beginning

09/29/2014

30 Days with Office 365 for Educators – Day 11

This week the College of Education & Professional Studies faculty & staff will be migrated from our existing email system to the new Office 365. This is a wonderful opportunity to re-examine our teaching and learning workflows. Below is one of my favorite quotes from the French mathematician and philosopher, Pascal.

Things are always at their best in the beginning.
Blaise Pascal

Kudos to anyone who can remember the Pascal programming language.

The planning for this move began last Spring but has kicked into high-gear at the beginning of this semester for the EIU faculty and staff conversion. There has been a tremendous amount of prep work getting to this point. We have upgraded all CEPS Outlook Desktop Client users to Office 2013 from Office 2010 as recommended by our IT department.

There are some known issues with the current email system and not everything will matchup with Office 365. Information Technology Services have provided instructions for how to address the known issues.

This is an extremely busy week for technical staff as we finalize plans for the CEPS faculty and staff to convert on Wednesday and Thursday nights this week.

Times have changed in that we not only have to address the main Desktop/Laptop computers but also setup any mobile devices to authorized faculty/staff.

Phones and tablets will be accessing a new Office 365 server so end users will need to setup new email connection to the Office 365 servers once the migration is completed. Technical staff will be available the morning after the conversion date to assist.

Please be patient as the conversion process takes place this week and be sure that all CEPS PantherMail users have followed the advice of our ITS department regarding group contacts, notes, briefcase items, and messages larger than 25MB. 

In the coming posts I hope to move from some of the more basic conversion issues and begin discussing the new possibilities Office 365 will offer our faculty, staff, and students.

We are about to begin a new beginning...

Exciting times.

Keep on Learning,

Tom Grissom, Ph.D.

Twitter: @tomgrissom

http://eiu.edu/itc