What is Microsoft 365?
Microsoft 365 (previously known as Office 365) is an online suite of applications which includes office productivity, email, file storage, collaboration tools, and other specialist applications. It also allows University of Otago staff to download Office applications (including Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) to both their work and their personally-owned computers.
Staff will have access to the following Microsoft 365 applications:
- Microsoft Office tools: Word, Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, and Publisher
- Microsoft Teams: a collaborative personal workspace that includes videoconferencing and instant messaging communication
- OneDrive: two terabytes of online storage (this can be updated on request)
- OneNote: digital notebook
Accessing Microsoft 365
All staff members who have an actively used @otago.ac.nz email address have a licence to access the Microsoft 365 suite for work and home. All University of Otago students are already using Microsoft 365.
All staff mailboxes have been migrated to Microsoft 365. Continue to use your email client (Outlook preferred) as currently set up, or Outlook Web App to access your email.
Signing in to Microsoft 365 online for the first time
- Open a new web browser session with no other tabs running. There is no need to use the University's VPN service to access Microsoft 365 online.
- Sign in to Office.com
- When you sign in to Microsoft 365, you will be asked to provide your work email address (for example james.bond@otago.ac.nz). When Microsoft detects your Otago email address, it will redirect you to the University's secure web-based login service. Enter your University username and password here.
- If your first sign-in is:
- From off-campus, you will be asked to set up multi-factor authentication (MFA) so follow the prompts. This video goes through the steps involved
- On campus, you will need to go directly to the MFA set up page. Choose mobile app and text as the additional authentication factors
Once this is done, you will be logged into the main Microsoft Office online portal. From here you can run web-based Office applications and collaborate with your colleagues.
Downloading Microsoft 365 to your computer or mobile device
If the computer you are now working on doesn’t have Office/Microsoft 365 installed on it already and you would like to download the applications to use directly on your computer, watch the video below for instructions:
How to Download and Install Office 365 Apps on PC or Mac
Sign in to Office.com and you will see a link on your homepage to install Office. If you already have Office 2016 or newer on your machine, there is no need to install Microsoft 365.
There are Microsoft 365 apps in both the Apple and Android app stores that will run various Office tools on your mobile devices.
Putting your work files into Microsoft 365 OneDrive or Teams sites
ITS suggest that as soon as you have logged in to Microsoft 365 for the first time, move any critical files you might need over the upcoming months into it. You can either upload them:
- Into OneDrive (if they are primarily for your use), or
- To your departmental Teams site, if they are for shared access
You can also create a Teams site for your immediate work team or to collaborate with colleagues across the University.
Further information
- Adding files and folders to OneDrive
- Data Storage Locations Guidance (PDF 405KB)
- Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
- Office 365 security – multi-factor authentication (MFA) and clinical data
- Support for Office 365
- Using files/folders in Microsoft Teams
Microsoft To Do does not allow the sharing of lists between organisation accounts and personal accounts.
If a To Do list is created using a personal Outlook account, it will only be possible to access this account using a personal account, not a University staff account.
Full access for University staff to use To Do lists with their University credentials will be available through the rollout of Office 365.
Office 2016 for Mac is no longer supported and will need to be updated to the Office 365 applications. University owned Macs should be enrolled in JAMF, which will keep their Office applications up to date. Please ask users to enrol any University-owned devices in JAMF — see Enrolling in JAMF , or update to Office 365 (by downloading the installer from office.com) and refer requests for further assistance through to the relevant IT Support Services team for them to assist with the upgrade.
Further information