Office 365 Quick Start Guide

Introduction 

Office 365 is a productivity environment that resides in the cloud.  Office 365 includes email, calendaring, tasks, and contacts (Outlook); file storage (OneDrive); and a number of other productivity tools such as OneNote and Delve. Office 365 allows you to access your email, files, and other productivity applications from anywhere you have an internet connection as well as from various mobile devices.

Special Concepts

• Client Application- A software application that resides and is accessed on your computer.
• Web Application-  A software application that resides and is accessed on the internet.

Steps to Access to Office 365 Web Application

1. Go to http://portal.office.com 
2. Sign in with your Indiana State University username and password. 
3. Complete multifactor authentication if prompted.

Steps to Access Email

Outlook from Your Desktop Client Application

You can continue to use Outlook as normal from the client application that runs on your computer to access your email, calendars, contacts and task.   The only change should be that those items will now be stored off-campus rather than in our on-campus Exchange environment.

Outlook from Office 365 Web Application

All Outlook functions (email, calendar, tasks, people (contacts)) in Office 365 are always available through the Office 365 web application from any web browser anywhere with internet access.

1. Go to http://portal.office.com 
2. Sign in with your Indiana State University username and password. 
3. Click the Outlook application to access your email, calendar, people (contacts) and task.

Please Note!  All of the functions in Outlook should work substantially the same in the Office 365 as they do from your desktop application.  However, web browsers may have different functionality.  For a consistent experience, Edge or Chrome browsers are recommended. Please consider the following as you use email in the Office 365 environment. 

Please consider the following as you use email in the Office 365 environment.

• Your primary Inbox (with all sent and received mail, your trash folder, junk mail, and mail stored in folders) is accessible through Office 365 on the Web and through the Outlook client application that will continue to run on your computer. 
• Your online (In Place) archive will be accessible through Office 365. 
• Archives stored on your hard drive will continue to be accessible only through your Outlook desktop client application.
• Webmail will route to Office 365 (office.portal.com) but for the time being you may continue to access webmail.indstate.edu.

Access to Apps 

The productivity applications may be accessed in the Office 365 portal on the launch page or by clicking the app launcher in the top left corner of the Office 365 portal.   You will see a list of the applications available in the Office 365 portal.  Please note, the Office of Information Technology supports most of the productivity applications.  There are however, some applications not supported by OIT.  Please see the related article, Article for a complete list of supported applications.