Campus Life

Resources available for Penn State's switch to Office 365

Credit: Penn StateCreative Commons

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — All students were transitioned by Penn State Information Technology (IT) over the summer to Office 365, the industry-leading email and calendaring system that will aid collaboration and innovation. As announced earlier this year, the unified platform can be accessed from anywhere in the world, at any time, on any device.

“The switch to Office 365 has a number of benefits for the University community,” said Michael Kubit, vice president for Information Technology and chief information officer. “It optimizes the University’s investment by reducing the number of email systems to one, and provides modern threat protection to ensure users are safe from malicious emails. It also provides students, faculty and staff with a set of tools to improve productivity and support digital fluency.”

There are a few steps students can take to access old emails and folders from Webmail that may not be immediately visible, due to previous account settings that may differ from account to account.

Penn State IT has prepared knowledge articles with step-by-step instructions to help students access old emails, set up forwarding to another email address, troubleshoot login issues and more.

Students can also get help by submitting tickets to the Help Request Portal or by emailing office365@psu.edu. Residential Computing resources are also available, and students can call, email or visit a ResCom office on campus for further technical support.

ResCom can also assist students who need to set up Office 365 on other devices.

Why switch?

Previously, Penn State relied on more than 20 different email platforms. The shift to Office 365 email and calendaring as the unified solution will help ensure the University’s strategic efforts to drive digital innovation and University-wide collaboration at Penn State, and support the University’s broad mission of teaching, research and service.

The cybersecurity of Penn State and the University community is of vital importance, and the implementation of Microsoft Office 365 comes with a premium security add-on, Advanced Threat Protection (ATP), to help ensure it.

ATP can identify malicious web addresses, email attachments and account compromises based on its built-in machine intelligence. Please be aware that you may experience a slight delay between the time an email with an attachment is sent and when the message is received. During the minimal pause, Microsoft’s automated ATP process analyzes the attachment for security concerns prior to delivery.

More than just email

Students, faculty and staff also have access to Office 365’s software suite of 15 new Microsoft applications. The industry-leading software enables users to create, collaborate and innovate from anywhere in the world, at any time, on any device.

Online training paths are available for all of them, ranging from the familiar Word, Excel and PowerPoint, to Teams and OneDrive.

Last Updated August 28, 2018