Making the most of Office 365 – Moving our files to the Cloud

August 12, 2021

As you may be aware, our Trust has chosen to upgrade our range of Office applications and move to Microsoft Office 365 as part of a major restructure of our working practices.

Whilst normally, an upgrade would simply involve a system being updated behind the scenes and an offering of new improvements becoming available, our latest upgrade will be one of the biggest changes to affect operational colleagues in their day to day work.

As part of our Office 365 upgrade, we will be drastically changing how we save and store our files in our departments, moving us away from our reliance on network share drives and over to a more managed storage system called Sharepoint.

This new way of working is focused on collaboration and cohesion, ensuring that colleagues are able to access the files they need when they need them and where they need them. With Office 365 applications such as Word, Powerpoint and Excel able to access and save directly to Sharepoint, and for colleagues being able to share and collaborate at will.

What does this mean for you when we migrate to Office 365:

• Desktop applications for Word, Excel, Powerpoint and Outlook will move to the Cloud where they will be accessible to colleagues from any computer they login from.
• Shared drives will become read only and all files will need to be migrated to Sharepoint as our longterm file storage solution.
• Personal folders (h drive) will need to be migrated to Microsoft Onedrive

What do you need to do now:

• Review all of your network shares and ensure that these are up to date, with files that you need to retain saved in their respective folders and files that can be disposed of deleted securely.
• Begin reviewing the training on offer by logging in to our training portal. This highlights all of the key differences between our current applications and working practices and those of Office 365.