Today@Dal

While the majority of the Dal community will be migrating to Office 365 email over the coming months, a small portion of staff have already made the transition. One of them is Wayne Paquet, who is director of enrolment services at the Agricultural Campus. We asked him to share some of his first impressions of Office 365 and his take on how the migration process worked.
 
What are your first impressions of Office 365 email?
 
Office 365 is great. The look and feel is very clean and works a lot like the regular Outlook client that I have been using. It is very intuitive and by far the best web email client that I have ever used.
 
How long did it take to get you up and running on Office 365?
 
Within 20 minutes I had created my new MS365 Outlook account, copied over my contacts and calendar to my new account, reconfigured my iPhone5 and had everything synced and working perfectly. Quick, smooth and not one single “gotcha.”
 
What feature/benefit do you appreciate the most, and what's been the most difficult thing to get used to?
 
The best part is that I no longer have to manually sync my calendar multiple times per day. I basically use three different tools to manage my email and create contacts and calendar appointments  – my iPhone5, the Outlook client on my laptop and the new MS365 web client – and now I never have to think which is the most up to date because they are auto-synced. All three tools give me the same view of my e-mail, contacts and calendar.
 
I haven’t found anything difficult to get used to yet but I’m still just scratching the surface of this tool. It is very powerful.
 
How do you think Office 365 is going to benefit you in your work at the university?
 
I’m really looking forward to when everyone is on Office 365 and we can start to explore calendar sharing and the “Schedule Assistant” so that we can simplify scheduling. Anyone who tries to schedule very busy people knows that it is almost impossible without a tool like Office 365 to help – and though Meeting Maker has some great functionality it isn’t used as widely on campus and it looks like O365 Calendar is a much superior product.

Visit the Office 365 website for more background on Dal's new email platform. You can also check out some of the questions people are asking on help.dal.ca — our community help website — and ask your own!