Microsoft applications outage for students

Microsoft applications will be unavailable for students from 16–22 December. See what this means for students and for you.

ACU is upgrading our Microsoft systems to allow better collaboration between staff and students and provide an optimised platform for future projects.

What’s changing?

Currently, staff and student accounts are located in separate zones. From 16–22 December, students will be migrated into the staff zone. This will allow for seamless collaboration and communication between staff and students, expanding the availability of Teams and other Microsoft applications. We'll share more details in the coming weeks.

What does this mean for students?

From Friday 16 December to Thursday 22 December there will be a significant outage for students:

• All ACU Microsoft applications will be offline. This includes Outlook, OneDrive, SharePoint and the web versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
• Students will not have access to their ACU email account and will need to communicate with staff through LEO or their personal email, as registered in Student Connect
• There will also be some work for students to prepare for the change such as downloading items from OneDrive, and some initial steps to re-establish some functionality such as email forwarding.

What will be the same?

Staff accounts will not be interrupted.

All non-Microsoft systems used within ACU will remain online for students, including:

• Student Portal, LEO/Moodle, inPlace, Student Connect, AskACU, wifi, printing, on-campus computer access
• desktop applications of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint can be used with local (offline) files
• all student emails will be available after the outage.

What do I need to do?

If you are working with students in the period from 16 December – 22 December, be aware that students will not be able to receive or send emails from their ACU email accounts during this time. This includes email notifications they would normally receive from LEO (email notifications only – LEO itself will continue to operate as normal).

In preparation for this you may like to:

• consider having no assignments due during this week
• prepare your students in advance and explain how communication will take place during this period in your unit, for example:
  
  • encourage students to log into LEO regularly to check for unit announcements and forum questions and answers
  • use a general discussion forum in your LEO unit to encourage students to ask unit questions there
  • regularly monitor the LEO unit forums
  • individual correspondence, if required during this period, can be sent through LEO messaging
• significant communications will be sent to students to inform them of these changes. You can support students by encouraging them to read and engage with these messages to ensure they are prepared for the change.

Please note: staff emails will not be affected during this time and only student emails are affected.

Feedback, concerns and questions

If you have any feedback, concerns or questions, please email CEI@acu.edu.au. All feedback and queries will be collated to present to ACU IT 365 Tenant Merger Project Working Group.