Dear All,

The following email has been sent to those on the e-learning email distribution list, so my apologies if you are seeing this for a second time.

I wanted to make sure that you were all aware of the release of Office 365 and the various elements that we hope will improve the Student Experience by giving our students greater access to free resources and in time better infrastructure (larger mailboxes, large amounts of cloud storage, etc).

Should anyone have any questions about this or require more information then please don’t hesitate to contact me directly. 

All the Faculty Support engineers have been provided with test accounts so that they can familiarise themselves with this in advance of the start of session and be in a position to assist students should there be any queries.

Kind regards,

Adrian

Adrian Mannall
Faculty IT Manager, Microsoft Licensing Specialist and HP Hardware Specialist

Faculty of Natural Sciences
ICT, Imperial College London
South Kensington Campus
323, Sir Ernst Chain Building – Wolfson Laboratories,
Exhibition Road
London  SW7 2AZ

Direct Dial Tel: +44 (0)20 7594 1441
College Ext'n: 41441
Mobile: +44 (0)7834 083134
Mobile Ext'n: 57974

Email: a.mannall@imperial.ac.uk

Web : http://www.imperial.ac.uk/

From: Voce, Julie K
Sent: 04 September 2014 12:37
To: e-Learning
Cc: IT Services, Faculty Support Managers; Gates, Laura P
Subject: Office 365

Dear All,

As you may be aware ICT has been working over the summer to implement Office 365 for students here at Imperial. Office 365 comprises infrastructure (email and unified communications servers and storage) and free software for students and represents an opportunity for College to add value to the student experience.

Software
With immediate effect all enrolled students (Undergraduate and Postgraduate) have access to free copies of Office software for PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, Windows phone and Android phone clients.  An Android tablet client is expected before the end of the year. This software is free for the whole period that the student remains enrolled at Imperial College. The software can be installed on up to 5 PC or Apple devices plus in addition on up to 5 mobile devices (iPad, phone, etc). The webpage with installation guidance can be found, here - http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/ict/services/softwarehardware/freesoftware and is linked via the Software Shop and student pages.

Email and Lync

Upon enrolment (from 8 September 2014), new undergraduate students joining College, will have their email hosted by Microsoft, giving a much larger mailbox quota than College could ever attempt to provide (up to 50GB). Email is accessible through web browsers in a similar manner to current College hosted mailboxes or through mail clients such as Outlook or iOS/Android mail clients using Exchange ActiveSync technology.   

Existing undergraduate students will have their mailboxes migrated into Office 365 during the first few weeks of term and they will be individually emailed with details of when the migration will take place and what changes they will need to make in the set-up of any mail clients that they have. Planning is underway for the migration postgraduate and staff accounts, expected to commence during 2015. Further updates will follow.

In addition to email, College is now providing ‘unified communications’ using Lync. This means that students will have the ability to communicate via instant messenger, web conferencing and chat directly with their peers and academic colleagues.

Storage

Office 365 for students also includes cloud hosted storage up to 1TB in capacity. This is accessible from anywhere that students can use a web browser. This is in addition to the H: drive which College hosts and will continue to provision for use in clusters.

Use of College e-learning systems

Office 365 should not impact on student use of College e-learning systems; however students using College PCs to upload files to Blackboard or Turnitin from their Office 365 storage space will need to download the files from Office 365 to their H: drive before upload. It is therefore recommended that students continue to use the H: drive for storing College work to avoid this additional step when it comes to assignment submission.

Questions

Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact your local Faculty Support Manager or team for further details. If students have problems accessing email or installing software then they should contact the ICT Service Desk