In alignment with UBC’s strategic plan to enable collaboration across the university and within our greater community, UBC will be building a foundation to introduce a suite of Microsoft 365 (M365) apps into our technology environment to continue supporting UBC as a global centre for teaching, learning, and research with a secure and integrated technology ecosystem.
About M365
M365 is a cloud service that combines the commonly used Office apps (e.g., Word, PowerPoint and Excel) with collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams and OneDrive. In response to the need for remote teaching and learning in June 2020, UBC rapidly introduced Microsoft Teams and OneDrive, marking the initial phase of our campus-wide Microsoft 365 journey. Now, we are taking this further by preparing the university for even more M365 productivity and collaboration tools in the future. With UBC fully integrated with M365, we will be able to create, collaborate and communicate seamlessly with our UBC community and other institutions.
Key Benefits
M365 offers scalability, resilience, security, and regular functional improvements to UBC’s productivity tool ecosystem. Benefits include:
Security
- Improved security and compliance
- Advanced threat detection
- Governance features
Productivity
- Comprehensive and integrated cloud-based suite of productivity tools
- Regularly updated tools so users always have the latest functionality
Collaboration
- Engage and collaborate more effectively across a variety of products, including real-time collaboration in Excel, Word and PowerPoint
Innovation
- Streamline workflows with automation processes
- Access new features for teaching, learning, research and work, including AI-enabled features (pending PIA and governance approval)
Current State and Future State
Microsoft is actively transitioning to subscription-based cloud services, leading to the phase-out of on-premise legacy products.
Currently, UBC relies on these legacy systems for on-premise Exchange and SharePoint. These systems are approaching end-of-life and will need to be phased out. Due to historically more stringent privacy legislation in British Columbia, UBC is behind other universities in their ability to adopt the latest cloud-based products and collaboration tools. In addition to the many benefits of moving to a cloud-based solution, it is important for UBC to be up to date with the most current systems being utilized across other major post-secondary institutions.
My M365 Account: Login Access
To log into M365 Office home page, please see here: https://portal.office.com To log into MS Teams from a browser, please go to: https://teams.microsoft.com
