Need help with Office 365? Let IT know

As the IT department migrates thousands of USA Health users to Office 365, the project’s managers have a message for employees who may have been missed or who are struggling with the new system: “Let us know. We will help you.”

Employees who are not receiving Outlook emails or require education with Teams, for instance, can submit a ticket through the Employee Hub website or call the IT Support Desk at 251-445-9123.

“Don’t just try to live with it,” said John Cherry, IT strategist for USA Health. “We don’t know what’s happening if you don’t tell us. If we don’t hear from you, we assume it’s going well.”

Cherry said the goal of the Office 365 migration project is to provide USA Health employees with a suite of useful software tools that can be accessed from anywhere and on any device, whether it is a desktop computer, laptop, tablet or a cell phone. Microsoft Teams, for instance, allows teams to communicate via secure messaging and calls, and collaborate more easily and in real time.

“In a COVID world, especially, it’s a necessity for people to access their applications, files, and even their fellow employees no matter where they are working,” he said.

Adopting Office 365 not only gives employees new tools, but it also provides a higher level of protection against cyberattacks, said Blake Hadley, manager of information security for USA Health. “In the case of emails, we will have more ability to stop phishing schemes,” Hadley said. Phishing is a type of scam that uses deceptive emails to enter an organization’s computer network and access sensitive information.

However, the migration project has faced challenges, resulting in problems with Outlook email accounts. Some employees had their address book revert to outdated information, calendars were not synced between those who migrated and those who hadn’t, and in some cases, people missed emails.

The Office 365 migration required IT to reorient each employee’s Outlook email account so that it is “pointed” to the correct vendor. But as the IT team members began reaching out to departments, they had trouble locating employees systematically.

“We thought it would be simple to go department by department and migrate them as one unit. That was probably unrealistic given people float and have irregular schedules,” Cherry said. “We still missed pockets of people.”

As a result, some employees began using the newly converted Outlook email, while others remained on the previous system. This resulted in many of the reported issues.

The remedy for such problems is to complete the migration, Cherry said. “If you’re experiencing trouble, part of the concerns you may have about migrating would be eliminated by migrating,” he said. “It seems counterintuitive, because the old system seems safe, but stability comes from everyone being on the same system.”

Employees who have not migrated to Office 365 can reach out to the IT Support Desk by submitting a ticket or calling directly. “We have finished migrating almost everyone,” Cherry said. “If we have missed you, or you are experiencing an issue, please let us know. We want to hear from you.