M365 Roadmap: An Interview with a Senior Product Manager at UBC

As UBC continues to evolve its digital workplace, the M365 project team is laying the groundwork for a secure and seamless Microsoft 365 environment across UBC. To provide greater clarity on what this means for the UBC community, we sat down with Mark Belsito, Senior Product Manager for M365, to learn more about his role and the broader vision for M365 at UBC. 

What is your role as the Microsoft 365 Product Manager for UBC and what does it entail? 
As a Senior Product Manager for M365 at UBC, my role is to define and execute the M365 adoption strategy across the university. This includes building and maintaining the M365 roadmap, implementing governance, security, and compliance standards, managing stakeholder engagement, overseeing change management and user adoption initiatives, ensuring licensing compliance and cost optimization, and introducing new tools and features aligned with UBC’s strategic goals. 

What’s the future vision for Microsoft 365 at UBC? 
Our vision is to establish a secure, integrated, and collaborative technology ecosystem that supports UBC’s mission as a global leader in teaching, learning, and research.  

What’s the path to get there? 
We are following a phased roadmap: 

• Phase 1: Build foundational services (Email migration to M365 for faculty, staff and students, setting up a licensing baseline, automating account provisioning, and introducing governance). 

• Phase 2: Deploy collaboration tools (such as SharePoint Online, Forms, Copilot, Power BI, Office Suite Deployment, Teams Room integration), enhance the security and compliance feature set, and improve account lifecycle management.  

The team is currently nearing the end of Phase 1 and prepping for Phase 2. 

What are the main challenges you foresee, and how will we address them? 
We face new challenges on a regular basis and are attempting to be as agile as possible without impacting progress on critical priorities. User adoption has taken a few years but it is encouraging to see how the UBC community has embraced the M365 platform. It has become a critical piece of day-to-day operations for those working at UBC.  

Some of the challenges that we are currently working on addressing are: 

• Improving our web presence to better communicate new features and services, and share progress with the UBC community. 

• Offering training sessions and iterating to address ongoing changes to the M365 platform. 

• Developing a means to charge back for premium services, so that the UBC community can acquire services such as enhanced Planner and Project offerings, Teams Premium, M365 Copilot, etc… 

• Ensuring security and privacy compliance with UBC standards in an ever evolving platform. 

• Managing storage consumption to account for new quotas that Microsoft has imposed at the M365 tenant level. As other universities across Canada have done, UBC will need to review the default quotas offered with our services. 

How will Microsoft 365 improve academic and administrative work at UBC? 
Moving to M365 will enable more collaborative capabilities for academic and administrative groups on campus. We will soon be rolling out the M365 Office Suite which will allow for better synchronous editing and collaboration, matching what is already available in the online version of Word, Excel and PowerPoint. With our services now in the cloud, we have the advantage of getting access to tools that are constantly improved and updated.  

Modern apps have improved accessibility features and integrate more seamlessly with other apps in the ecosystem. Microsoft Teams has greatly improved in the video conferencing space and offers a more collaborative experience than other conferencing tools. The team is also currently exploring opportunities in the education space, working with the Learning Technology Innovation Centre (LTIC) to test out potential features. Although there is a long road ahead, the team has made significant progress in building an attractive platform for academic and administrative groups at UBC. 

What impacts will Microsoft 365 have on users? How should users adjust to these changes? 
We have seen significant growth in usage in the M365 service over the last year, driven by the migration of email to M365. Usage has grown from about 50K active users in November 2024 to 80K active users on the platform in March 2026. More adoption means more opportunities to collaborate with colleagues. The team has been trying to address some of the challenges surrounding onboarding and have made major strides in this area. This involves dismantling a lot of legacy infrastructure and processes, and rebuilding them all behind the scenes. The onboarding processes will improve over time and make it easier to consume the M365 services. Unfortunately, not all M365 services are available yet. They will come in time, as we work through the phased approach mentioned previously. 

We hope that users will take advantage of the services that we have to offer, and we encourage faculty, staff and students to attend training sessions and leverage our support resources to learn how to better use the tools that we have available. 

How will M365 license distribution work? Who receives what license? 

• The majority of faculty, staff and student employees get an M365 A3 license which includes access to Teams, OneDrive, Email and many other apps, and will soon include the option for a downloadable version of the Office applications (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.). A smaller subset of employees (service workers, unpaid clinical faculty and contractors) are eligible for an A1 license which includes access to web-only versions of the M365 apps. 

• Students get an M365 A3 license which comes with the downloadable Office suite and a full suite of M365 apps. 

• Emeriti and Guests are eligible for Email Only licenses.  

More information can be found on the M365 licensing page 

What training, resources, or support are available to help people make the most of Microsoft 365?