What is Office365?
Office 365 (O365) is a cloud-based environment that replaces ISU's on-campus Exchange/Outlook environment for faculty/staff email. Office 365 can be accessed at office.portal.com. When you enter your University username and password, you will be accessing ISU's Office 365 environment. Our student email already runs in this environment.
What is included in Office 365?
Office 365 provides access to electronic mail, OneDrive, and other productivity tools, many of which support working collaboratively with others.
What are the differences between what I have now and Office 365?
Your email should work the same way. Whether you use your Outlook client or Webmail, you will simply be running from a different server environment, which will be off campus rather than on campus. Office 365 does offer some new tools: OneDrive is now our standard for storage of files used by individuals (replacing the H: drive); and there are other office productivity tools such as Teams and Yammer that are completely new to our environment.
Will my Microsoft applications (e.g. Word, Excel, Powerpoint) run in the cloud now?
Not in most cases. In most cases you will continue to use your desktop Microsoft Office applications, and they will work the same way they do now. However, you will be able to also log in to your campus Office 365 account and use Office Online to access these applications. You may want to do this if you are away from your home and office and do not have your institutional laptop with you.
What do I have to do to move to Office 365?
Nothing, in order to keep running as you are. This is an enterprise migration. You will receive or have received special messaging about the migration. Once the migration is complete, the Office 365 capabilities are available to you. The only thing you may have to do is to move files to OneDrive over time. Please see the OneDrive section of our knowledge base for more information.
Should I still use Webmail?
Outlook.office365.com replaces Webmail. It is part of portal.office.com, which is the hub for all the productivity tools that are a part of the Office 365 environment.
Will I be able to access my archives from Office 365?
You will be able to access your online (In-Place) archive from Office 365, just like you can from Webmail. The email archive(s) that reside on your computer hard drive will not be accessible from Office 365 (as they are not from Webmail). You may continue to access them through the Outlook client on your computer.
Will I have more space for email in the Office 365 environment?
Yes, everyone will have 100Gb of primary email storage and an online archive with unlimited space. This is increased over the 2Gb we provide now for your primary storage, and the 5Gb we provide for your online archive.
Will email retention restrictions change in the Office 365 environment?
Our email retention limits are driven by our document retention strategy, not the amount of space you have or where your email is stored. Our email retention restrictions will not change because we are moving to Office 365.
How will training, documentation, and support be provided for these new tools?
OIT will provide knowledge base articles, like this one. Some knowledge base articles will be FAQs; others will be instructions to do various things, such as setting up Office 365 on your smart phone. OIT will also provide periodic training. This will begin as we determine what people need the most help with or are most interested in. Finally, you can always access support either through our online service catalog at www.indstate.edu/oit (click Service Catalog), or by calling 812-237-2910.
If Office 365 runs off campus, what happens if there is a network outage?
For the time being, if the network is down you will not be able to access Office 365 from either on or off campus if we experience a network outage. This is because you authenticate (sign in) to the system through a system that is located on campus. It is possible that if you were already logged in to Office 365 from off campus when the network outage occurs, you would continue to be able to use the system as long as you stayed logged in. OIT is investigating strategies for mitigating this situation given our continued move toward cloud-hosted services.