Office365 Project Meeting Minutes

September 30, 2015 11:00 a.m.-noon 

Participants :  Joe Moreau, Pam Eberhardt, Sharon Luciw, Lisa Hocevar, Jose Rueda, John Vandercook, Kelly Pettit, David Ulate, Marty Kahn, Chien Shih, Jerrick Woo, Mahmood Hasan,  Deepa Prasad, Claire Chang, Linda Koyama

1. Chien shared the URL for the Office365 Project web site http://ets.fhda.edu/projects/_office365/index.html and briefly went over the project scope,objectives and milestones.  Meeting minutes can be accessed on the project website.

2. Team collaboration Newsfeed

   1. By Monday, October 5th, everyone will see the Office365 channel on the employee tab in MyPortal.  Claire is in the process of provisioning the channel for all ETS employees.  Chien hopes that as everyone gets familiar and starts using Office365, they will add comments, questions and suggestions on the ETS Office365 newsfeed so that everyone can share their ideas:  MyPortal -> employee tab -> Office 365 -> Newsfeed -> Everyone
      
      

   2. One concern was raised regarding blogs that instructors may want to start with their students and the required length of time the blog must be saved.  We have licenses available for students but provisioning O365 for students is still in the discussion stage with the Tech Task Force and Etac committee.

3. Email and Calendar
   1. There is an OWA version in O365 which incorporates desired features found in the client application such as folder sharing, but would involve a major migration to the cloud.  Since there are no major complaints with our current set up, we may want to wait until the next hardware refresh on premises for exchange is required, which is a couple of years down the road.  A hybrid approach may be a solution for the future where access to email and calendar would happen on the cloud but storage would be on-premises.  
      
      
   2. Students are also interested in obtaining an .edu email address.  More discussion is necessary.
4. Chien went over the proposed roll out schedule:
   1. 3/25/15 - 6/15/15 Facility went live
   2. 10/5/15 - 10/30/15 ETS pilot testing
   3. 11/2/15 - 11/30/15 Super users pilot testing
   4. 12/7/15 Roll out to the colleges and District
      
      
5. Chien went over the objectives of using O365:
1. Using O365 to share your documents with others.  It is possible to share documents with people inside and outside of FHDA and allow others read-only or edit capability.  There is a check box when sharing the document to require a microsoft log in or not.  Five document libraries will also be set up:  1) For ETS managers, 2) For the entire department, 3) Sharon's group 4) David's group, and 5) Chien's group.  Joe cautioned to keep in mind that what you share in the document libraries will be accessible to everyone who has access to that library.
   
   
2. Contribute to the blog or newsfeed.  Claire has set up a global newsfeed for everyone to contribute their comments, questions and tips.
   
   
3. Review and improve the on-line documentation and training materials.  Since training videos that are available on Lynda.com include features that we are currently not using and often includes pricing information, Marty suggested that we may want to customize our training videos in the future.
   
   
4. Support the implementation by participating in the team meetings. weekly meetings have been scheduled on Wednesdays at 11 a.m. in the Green Room.
   
   
5. Research the local drive sync and make it works with O365 for FHDA.  The Onedrive sync is currently not working correctly for Macs; ETS will wait until a solution is available for both PCs and MACs before offering it to the district.  Everyone suspects this will be a highly desirable feature by all.  Deepa has it currently working for her windows laptop and desktop.  There was discussion regarding the info stored on the district Onedrive account when a person retires or leaves the district.   Jose suggested that current policy would continue; when they turn in their district computer, they can transport any files to an personal external drive, including everything in their Onedrive account.
6. Creating web sites with Sharepoint:  Marty was concerned that if we allow staff to create their own websites using O365, we would have no control over the content.  He suggested to turn this option off for now.
   
   
7. Questions were raised at the Opening Day Workshop reagarding staff that have a personal O365 account at home and moving to the district license.  We will need to research it further.
   
   
8. Claire and Deepa gave a Demo for Onedrive.  In word online, there is no need to save your document; it is autosaved regularly.  Also, sharing a document allows for co-editing simultaneously and different versions are saved in case you need to revert to a previous version.  Marty had some difficulty logging in with his iphone; we will need to investigate further, but the ipad worked fine.
   
   
9. There was much discussion about turning on the capability for staff to download the five free versions of Microsoft Office to their work or personal computers.  Future discussion must include administrator rights and clear documented instructions.