Day 15 – Basics of Getting Started with Office 365 Email - Migration Day

10/03/2014

30 Days with Office 365 for Educators - Day 15

Over the past two days the College of Education & Professional Studies faculty and staff have successfully converted from the old email system to the new Office 365 service. Approximately 150 user accounts have been migrated over the past two days.

Converting an entire email system that users are familiar with to a new and different system impacts an entire organization. It can also cause some anxiety as the process takes place.

I thought I would share some basic information that may be of help to others that are moving to Office 365 in the future. Our college is one of the first to complete this process at EIU for faculty and staff and we have learned a few lessons along the way that are worthy of sharing.

Getting started out of the gate should not be overlooked. The current Office 365 Start Screen consists of a grid of icons and it was not obvious for brand new users where to start. Most are expecting to see an email program when they login the first time and may not know to click on the Outlook icon to get there. The old PantherMail system took users directly to their Inbox.

Office 365 first displays a Start Screen since it is so much more than email. Keep in mind that because Office 365 is a cloud service that changes to the interface can occur at any time in a wholesale fashion. This sudden change can be disconcerting to users if they do not know it is coming.  

I prefer the Start Screen, but it can be changed to open directly to the Outlook Web App as I have discussed in a previous post. See Day 2 - Setting the Office 365 Start Screen 

The screenshot below shows the first screen a new EIU Office 365 user will see when they login to the “new” PantherMail from the EIU hompage for the first time.
(Click on the image below to enlarge, press BACK to return to this page)

To go to the "new" EIU email system simply click on the blue Outlook Icon at the main Office 365 Start Screen. That may seem obvious to many but there are users who have never heard of Outlook. To compound matters Microsoft uses the Outlook term in different ways so it can be confusing to new users.
(Click on the image below to enlarge, press BACK to return to this page)

The other thing that surprised a few people was that the Inbox icon did not display all the subfolders by default after the conversion. The migration process can be stressful and it is a bit disconcerting to see your brand new Inbox displayed with no subfolders.

Some assumed that something went wrong during the migration process and thought they had lost all their email in subfolders, they did not. The answer turns out to be a simple one in that you just simply click on the triangle next to the Inbox to “Expand” the Inbox to display subfolders. Click the triangle again to collapse the list back.
(Click on the image below to enlarge, press BACK to return to this page)

When you change an entire email system there are bound to be some training issues as everyone must learn the new system. There is always a range of technical abilities within any organization. There are very technical users that can easily adjust to the new look, but there are also others that may require additional training to become familiar with the new interface. No matter whether you are technical or not, change is hard.

We do have a few issues that we are still working through. Some of these we knew about beforehand like Contact Groups not being carried over, but there are also some timing and syncing issues with our university Office 365 contacts.

I would like to thank our Information Technology Services department as this migration has taken a great deal of planning and work to get to this point. Migrating an entire email system in the middle of the semester is challenging but we are now on our way to accessing new services and capabilities that we have never had before.

The other lesson learned is that many users wanted assistance with mobile phones and tablets to setup to access their EIU email. This did require an additional workload for the tech support staff and should be factored into the migration process.

Overall, CEPS faculty and staff are now using the new Office 365 service and we look forward to new possibilities, especially for teaching and learning.

Keep on Learning,

Tom Grissom, Ph.D.

Twitter: @tomgrissom

http://eiu.edu/itc