by Jacob Fuhrer |
Love it or hate it, Microsoft Office 365 is here to stay. UP officially transitioned students to the new email and software suite on Jan. 6, but the software had been tested since November.
According to Michelle Sunderland, director of technical services, initial feedback has been positive.
“Overall we are extremely pleased,” Sunderland said. “The biggest challenge for us is actually communication and keeping the campus informed about the change.”
Emily Gast, a junior finance major, welcomed the change to Microsoft Office.
“I really like it,” Gast said. “I was using OneDrive before ... It’s much more intuitive.”
OneDrive is the storage solution akin to Google Drive, which students will have to part ways with as part of the transition. It’s just one of the new features available to students now that the rollout is complete.
OneDrive will allow students to collaborate with professors more easily by sharing documents. Sunderland said Information Services is also working on a feature to immediately upload papers from Office to Moodle, bypassing the need to save and re-upload documents.
However, not everyone is pleased with the switch.
Tori Dunlap, a senior organizational communication major, misses the old Gmail and jokingly posted a petition on Change.org to bring back back the old system. At the time of this writing, the petition has 17 supporters.
“It was more a kind of joke because myself and my friends have been talking about how much we hate it,” Dunlap said.
Dunlap said she misses the layout and format of Gmail, which made scrolling through emails and messages smoother. Dunlap says she was also unable to access her email for several days due to a problem during the transition.
Indeed, Sunderland acknowledged some initial hiccups with the software rollout, including passwords not working and files not transferring from one account to the other.
Professors also ran into an issue sending emails to students, but Sunderland says IS quickly addressed the issue.
The Microsoft Office Suite is currently available for download on Apple computers by visiting the IS page on the Pilots online portal. The windows version of Office 2016 is slated to be available in February.
Jacob Fuhrer is a reporter for The Beacon. He can be reached at fuhrer17@up.edu or on Twitter @jacobfuhrer.
