Office 365 for Education Plan A2

Office 365 (Plan A2) is the educational offering of Exchange Online and a number of other services. Tufts has entered into an agreement with Microsoft to host Student mail in their cloud hosted environment. Members

Why a cloud hosted email solution?

Cloud services is an area that Tufts continues to consider. From a strategic perspective there will always be some services that Tufts may prefer to host internally out of a desire to maintain control over the roadmap of the service. In some instances, it may be beneficial for the University to partner with industry leaders as a value addition to the Tufts portfolio, allowing our teams to focus more on services that are directly related to the core mission of the University.

Some examples of existing successful cloud partnerships

• Hosted Webex More Information
• Hosted Qualtrics Survey Tool More Information
• Hosted Box Storage More Information

Will everyone eventually join the cloud?

EI is approaching this transition as an opportunity to evaluate the marketplace and quantify how Students utilize collaboration tools like o365 and mail services differently than Faculty, Staff, etc. At this juncture there is no plan to transition other constituents to the cloud.

Who will be moved to the cloud?

With the initial service offering TTS is only planning to transition students to the cloud. We are adopting an admissions-based migration path which means only students new to the university will have their accounts provisioned in the cloud as opposed to onsite.

Students joining the university should be directed to https://tuftstools.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/student to create their Tufts Username and Tufts Password

What about existing students, will they be migrated to the cloud?

At this juncture TTS is only planning to onboard incoming students that are new to the university into Office 365. Seniors that are joining a graduate program, or staff that transition to students, etc. are not expected to make a switch. We're comfortable with the knowledge that both our On Premise Exchange 2010 and Cloud Hosted Office 365 environments offer a robust communication platform and we would prefer not to disrupt our supported students by migrating them at this time.

What is included in Office 365 "Plan A2?"

This licensing breakdown helps describe the available possibilities.

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/academic/office-365-academic-FX103045755.aspx

It is important to note that although O365 includes Lync and Sharepoint Online solutions, ESS is still currently still evaluating them amongst other services and does not plan to make them immediately available with this service offering.

How can I tell if my Tufts mailbox is in the cloud?

Please visit https://exchange.tufts.edu and sign in using your Tufts Username and Tufts Password. Accounts that actually exist in the cloud will be prompted to move to the cloud to authenticate instead

Is Email in the cloud different?

There are some differences between email hosted by Microsoft and email on premise through Tufts, but at the end of the day as an email service and a collaboration tool, the service is fairly similar. While possible to use your favorite modern mail application (Outlook, Mac Mail, etc.) we recommend students use the Outlook Web Access client as it includes some functionality that is not present even in modern mail applications:

• Inline link previews
• Addressbook Integration with Social Media (Linkedin, Facebook, etc.)
• OWA is the same interface no matter what operating you use, provided it is a modern internet browser.

For information on how to best use the Office 365 service once you receive your account, please visit https://it.tufts.edu/stu-email or view our public documentation https://go.tufts.edu/itkb