Overview and Resources
Minnesota State has been transitioning all campuses to a shared Microsoft Office 365 academic environment for all students and employees. Microsoft Office 365 is a suite of cloud-hosted tools which includes the Office Productivity Suite (Word, PowerPoint, Excel), email and calendar (Outlook), and Microsoft Teams.
In 2018, Normandale migrated students and employees to the Office 365 MinnState tenant, except for employee email. Unlike other Minnesota State institutions who use older phone technology, our Skype phone system is tied to our email. Email for all other Minnesota State institutions is a part of the common Office 365 system. Our IT staff have worked with system IT staff to run a pilot program that uses the phone system in Teams (part of Office 365), a very similar system to our current Skype phones. Moving our phone system to Teams in Office 365 makes it possible to move our email to the common system used by all other Minnesota State institutions.
After the migration, employees who are actively affiliated with multiple Minnesota State institutions will be able to access their email, calendars, and other Office 365 resources from any location with a single account. Our students already have that benefit.
When will Normandale Employees migrate to the Minnesota State Office 365 Unified Tenant?
The migration is scheduled for:
- Phone System: June 18, 2020
- Phones will not be available from 6am to 8am
- After 8am, please use Microsoft Teams to make and take calls. Skype for Business will be disabled and will no longer be available.
- Email: June 19-21, 2020
- Full copy of email mailbox starting at 6am on 6/19. Do not make any changes on your calendar or create any new meetings.
- Email will not be available from 2pm 6/19 to sometime on 6/21.
- June 22 - Normandale's email and voice services will be in the Office 365 Shared Tenant. We will have fully transitioned to the Minnesota State Shared Microsoft Office 365 environment for all students, faculty, and staff.
- Account Provisioning Freeze Dates: 6/9 - 6/23
- No new user accounts can be provisioned during those dates
- We can resume account provisioning on 6/23
What is the impact to me?
- Phone migration
- Please see our Pre-migration Checklist
- After the migration
- you will use Microsoft Teams to place and receive calls;
- you will not have access to Skype for Business anymore;
- you will need to log in to your desk phone differently.
- In between the phone and email migration:
- Voicemails will be delivered to your Office 365 mailbox.
- We will set up forwarding rules to deliver them to your Normandale mailbox.
- Email Migration
- No access to email from 6/19 at 2pm until 6/21 sometimes during the day. Mail may be returned to sender. We encourage phone or D2L messaging during this time.
- Mail will migrate, but many personal settings will need to be saved by you, see our pre-migration checklist (coming soon).
- After the migration, you will need to use StarID@minnstate.edu to log into your email.
Do I need to prepare for the Migration?
Yes, there are several tasks that you will want to complete in order to prepare for migration. Pleas see our Pre-migration Checklist, watch your email for items from IT Communications and stay tuned to this site for further update.
What do I need to do after the migration?
After the migration, you will need to complete a few steps to access phone and email. Please see our Post-migration Checklist.
Office 365 Employee Phone and Email Migration Knowledge Base Articles:
Microsoft Teams Phone Migration
Office 365 Email Migration