Prior to the current global pandemic ILS were already running an Office 365 project to deliver the infrastructure, knowledge and support required to roll out Office 365 to staff and students. The project was approaching the completion of a pilot phase and was preparing to migrate staff email into secure, university governed storage in the cloud, and deliver an integrated OneDrive for Business, Teams and email cloud solution.
As part of the Business Continuity Planning effort for coronavirus, staff access to Teams was accelerated, without email migration to the university cloud, to allow people to continue to work remotely. This enabled staff access to Teams, but with limited functionality and erratic user experience. Feedback from colleagues reflects this and we recognise, and share, the frustration this causes.
The project team have reviewed the timescale and are bringing forward the staff migration schedule. Migrating your email into the university cloud will integrate your email and calendar with the other Office 365 applications, which will provide you with a more integrated digital experience, enhanced functionality and a standardised experience which aligns with Microsoft online training, videos and help.
The project team are now planning the activities required; migration tasks, communications and a university rollout plan are currently being developed. Once the rollout plan is approved, we will share it along with migration preparation information for you.
Student access to Teams
In response to your feedback around the challenges you are experiencing when communicating with students, students will be given access to Microsoft Teams. Teams is Microsoft's long-term replacement for Skype for Business. Chat, calling and meeting functionality is available now in Teams, so once Teams is enabled for students you can use it to work with and support them.
When Teams is switched on for students they can be added to a Team or create their own, so be mindful of the information being stored and shared within Teams you share with students to ensure that GDPR and data privacy regulations are adhered to. Take extra care when setting up and managing membership of Teams not to accidentally add students; adding students to Teams containing sensitive data would be considered a data breach.
To prepare for students joining staff in Teams we are making changes to some existing Teams. All public teams will be changed to private, so that students do not get automatic access to them and the data they contain. Any Teams that are meant to be public and seen by students can be changed back to public by the Team owner.
Teams is a great tool and it has a lot of potential to enhance support of and collaboration with our students. However, it also includes overlap features which are already available within our existing systems. It's important to remember that it is not a replacement for our Virtual Learning Environment. Teaching should continue to be delivered via Moodle and Panopto. Teams is an additional resource for you to use for small group activity and other student-staff or student-student interactions, not a replacement of our existing teaching tools.
The work to add students to our Teams environment will be completed by Friday 10 April, this gives you time to create and amend Teams to share with students before teaching restarts on Monday 27 April.
