Microsoft 365 tenant migration this week

ACU is committed to providing the best possible environment for both staff and students to grow and develop. In our efforts to create a future-proof technological space for seamless collaboration and integration between staff and students, all student accounts will be moved into the staff tenant between 16–22 December 2022.

What is a tenant?

'Tenant' is the name Microsoft gives to an organisation within their environment. ACU currently has staff and students in two separate tenants.

Bringing staff and students into one tenant will allow us to take advantage of all the in-built and upcoming features within the Microsoft 365 suite of products to provide an enhanced, innovative learning environment.

What does this mean for students?

• There will be an outage for student ACU email and other Microsoft services (One Drive, SharePoint, Teams) while the migration occurs. This is scheduled to occur from 16–22 December 2022.
• Student data will be maintained and made available again after the outage.
• There may be some work for students to complete post migration if they have customised settings/features within their accounts.

What does this mean for staff?

• There is no outage for staff accounts.
• The single tenant environment will simplify many labour-intensive tasks currently in use (eg. the processing of proof for special consideration and extension applications).
• There will be some changes made to the security and governance settings within the tenant to provide restrictions between staff and students, including the default options when sharing files.

Why migrate?

Migrating students into the staff tenant will support:

• ACU Online and Canvas: A single tenant offers faster, simpler and more efficient collaborative opportunities to complement learning and teaching.

• Agility and responsiveness: A single tenant is best placed to support the needs of ACU staff and students and will provide a better student experience. Many third-party applications cannot accommodate a dual tenant structure.

• Workforce skills: A single tenant will enable staff and students to work together in ways that provide students with transferable skills in the workforce.

• Security: A single tenant will allow ACU to increase security for student accounts by applying Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA). To learn more about MFA, see Keeping students safe with MFA in 2023.

• Operational efficiencies: The existing two-tenant environment duplicates effort, cost and administration.

More information will be made available as ACU explores the opportunities offered by the tenant migration.

This is the first step in a long process of future enhancement, with additional features, integrations and services to be developed as we grow and evolve our methods to suit the needs of our students and staff.

Find out more about the migration and specific impacts for students