2022: Celebrating 25 years of Desktop Productivity with Microsoft 365

Although Microsoft Office was initially released in 1990, it was the release of Office 97 that established the suite of products as the premiere desktop productivity package. At that time, when computers weren’t as common in the workplace as they are today, the professional version of the desktop productivity package included five primary applications, a word processor (Word), a spreadsheet editor (Excel), a presentation program (PowerPoint), a database manager (Access) and a personal information manager (Outlook). Throughout the past 25 years, Microsoft released nine major versions of Office for Windows and eight major versions for Mac. These “on-premise” releases of Microsoft Office, the most recent being Office 2019, are what most people think of when thinking about Microsoft Office.

In 2010, facing stiff competition from Google Apps (a cloud-based, productivity and collaboration suite), Microsoft began the gradual shift to offering Microsoft Office as a service on a subscription basis. This subscription-based service would extend the use of Office products into the cloud and across mobile platforms including iOS and Android. In 2020, this product was rebranded as Microsoft 365.

In 2022, due to changes in the University’s licensing of Microsoft products, Information Technology will start shifting computers from yesteryear’s on-premise version of Microsoft Office 2019 to the modern work experience of Microsoft 365. The productivity applications you’ve come to rely on (e.g., Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote, OneDrive, Teams) will still be available on each and every classroom, lab and office computer. The experience of using these applications will remain familiar and consistent.

Microsoft 365 Resources and Training

Microsoft 365 Learning Resources (authentication required) has been customized by the University’s Division of Information Technology team. This resource is curated to provide our campus with updated training information for the products that are available on our campus.

Power Automate is available on our campus. For resources, visit Microsoft Power Automate documentation.

The Microsoft 365 Training website combines video and step-by-step training with template, quick starts and easy handouts.

Teams Beginner Training for Faculty and Staff

Through Bookings, you can reserve Microsoft Teams training to review Teams and answer any other M365 program questions. Feel free to bring a colleague. This one-hour session is in-person in AMH 109. This is a beginner session. Click here for online resources and training.

Windows 11

Windows 11, the newest, major version of Microsoft’s operating system was released on October 5, 2021. For an organization, the release of any new operating system can be challenging as resources need to be allocated to confirm that legacy hardware and software is compatible with the new operating system. Processes for deploying and managing the new operating system also need to be verified.

Information Technology is preparing its strategy for migrating to Windows 11. More information about this strategy and the availability of Windows 11 will be communicated in 2022. In the meantime, rest assured that your Windows 10 computer will continue being secured, maintained and managed.

After a successful pilot in the spring 2021 semester, the Student Success Attendance and Early Alert system will be implemented during the Fall 2021 semester as a means to support student success.  While the system will be primarily used by course instructors teaching first year courses with General Education attributes FYS, FYW, FYOC, and FYDT, the system can be accessed by any instructor on campus teaching in the regular and/or special terms.  The system will replace all notice of academic difficulty forms.

The easy-to-use system allows an instructor to submit an early alert related to academic performance, attendance, tardiness, and/or minor engagement issues as early as week two of the semester when the system opens.  Early alerts are sent to the student’s advisor on record for processing and early intervention.  The system will remain open until the midpoint of the semester.

The “Student Attendance and Early Alert Application” is intended to have the following student outcomes:

• Increase student class attendance and participation.
• Improve student engagement with professors and academic advisors.
• Prompt students to share responsibility for their academic success by maximizing use of campus resources.

Documents – including instructions and guidance – for course instructors and advisors can be found here on the website of the Office of Student Retention and Completion.  There is also a system demonstration video on that website.  Any questions about the system can be directed to Nicholas Truncale, Director of Student Retention and Completion, at nicholas.truncale@scranton.edu.

The return to campus in Fall 2020 posed new challenges for students, staff and faculty alike. The need for students to quarantine and isolate created not only logistical tasks for the Division of Student Life, but also student absence reporting responsibilities in the Division of Academic Affairs.

With little time to plan a thorough absence notification process, Student Health and the Dean’s Offices collaborated this past Fall by sharing lists of students on quarantine/isolation three times a week. From these lists, the staff of the Dean’s Office manually looked up each student’s schedule and then wrote an email to each faculty member informing him/her/they of the student’s attendance status. The process was labor-intensive and time-consuming. End-of-term feedback from faculty indicated that the processing delay and the varying senders and content made it difficult to understand each student’s individual status.

In January, staff from Student Health, Student Life, Information Technology, and the Provost’s Office met to reimagine the absence notification process. Some goals of the new process, they agreed, were to 1. centralize the data so that it was accurate and timely, 2. improve the speed of the notification process, 3. utilize consistent notification text, and 4. designate one point of contact for the process.

As a result of their intradepartmental collaboration, the process was finalized just in time for the start of the Spring 2021 term. In sum, student data from Medicat, the software used by contract tracers to ascertain quarantine/isolation time periods, is deposited daily in a SharePoint site. An algorithm designed by IT de-duplicates the student records, leaving only new student records for processing. These student records are combined and merged into a new template with the output of the Argos report “GEN STUDENT SECTION” to collect schedule information for the new students in quarantine/isolation. This new data set is then automatically mail merged in Microsoft Outlook to send individual faculty notification emails from a new email account named “absencenotification@scranton.edu” that was created for the process. All told, the mostly automated process takes roughly 15 minutes a day, as compared to the hours dedicated to the tasks in the fall term.

Dr. Sufyan Mohammed, Professor, Department of Communication and Media, describes how this new process has helped him track students in quarantine/isolation: “I am very pleased with the new faculty notification process that informs faculty about students that are in quarantine or isolation. I receive the notifications faster than I did last semester and it is a great way of keeping track of students that may need some extra assistance. The timely notification also gives me time to plan any makeup exams or projects the students may have missed. I also teach students from all three colleges and I am glad the process is consistent across the University. Thank you for setting up such an efficient system in such a short time.”

Article by Julie Ferguson, Registrar, Office of the Registrar and Academic Services and Nicholas Truncale ’06, G’07, Director of Student Retention