Online collaboration with Office 365

Leveraging collaboration opportunities with Office 365

Previously, Microsoft Office 365 was available to employees in an opt-in format. Many people took advantage of the 5TB of storage OneDrive provides,  and the convenient ability to access files using any device, from any location. This ease of use and concurrent editing and collaboration of documents organically lead to an increase of files being shared between users. However, collaboration efforts were being hindered by the requirement for users to 'opt-in'. In response to this problem and in preparation for future opportunities, IST's Technology Integrated Services (TIS) pre-enabled all employees in the O365 environment. 

Following the uptake of OneDrive, and after seeing a dramatic increase in the requests and use of Teams for instant messaging, TIS staff created an automated request system to receive, process and deploy new Teams more quickly. The group did not predict how important this work would be. With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and a rapid shift to remote work, the Microsoft Office 365 environment was one of many applications used to address the challenges that exist within a distributed workforce.

Upcoming changes to increase access to and use of Office 365

Earlier in 2019, IST began investigations into moving students from a standalone Microsoft tenant into the tenant used by faculty and staff, as well as moving on-premises employee email to the cloud. This investigation lead to the recommendation that migrating accounts from the @edu.uwaterloo.ca tenant to the @uwaterloo.ca tenant, and employee email to the cloud, would allow for greater collaboration and a much improved user experience. The recommendation was approved and an implementation project started immediately. 

Many requests are being made for additional Office 365 features. A lot of these more advanced features require either the students to be in the same tenant as employees, or the individual's email to be in the cloud. After significant planning and preparation, the migration of students to the employee tenant is now complete (April 28). IST will begin to transition employee email to the cloud soon, which will allow employees to use these new features/apps.

Although these are cloud services offered by Microsoft, there is still a significant amount of planning, design and configuration required by IST. This complex task is necessary to ensure privacy and security of the data, and manageability, interoperability, and integrations with existing infrastructure, systems, and identity management lifecycles. 

While the Office 365 collaboration suite is gaining momentum, our on-premises telephony/Voice over IP and instant messaging platform, Skype for Business, is still performing strong as groups continue to migrate from traditional copper phone lines. 

Interesting stats

Use of Skype compared to use of Teams

Skype for Business instant messaging data was not available for February or March.

Teams activity

There are 46 million files in OneDrive using 145 TB of space. There are ~13,000 users in the University of Waterloo (employee) tenant; ~20% of campus is actively using Teams.