By Laura Brent, co-editor

Starting in the 2017-2018 school year, Lebanon Valley College will use Microsoft Office 365 as its email platform; the new email migration features many helpful tools for students and staff.

LVC used WorldClient as its email server previously. Students, adjuncts, retirees and more than 4,000 alumni have been already migrated to Office 365. The IT department will continue to migrate LVC staff and faculty to Office 365 this fall.

“We believe in constantly updating and improving our services, so we looked to Office 365 to do that for both email and file storage,” David Shapiro, senior director of information technology & chief information officer, said. “We believe this will offer students a better email service with more storage and also allow collaboration with faculty and professors in your address book.”

Office 365 integrates the latest version of the Microsoft Office Suite which is free and available to every student. In addition to Microsoft Office Suite, Office 365 offers a calendar, OneDrive, Planner, Tasks, Groups, SharePoint and more.

The new mail feature pulls in the entire LVC database; therefore, there’s no need to memorize or search for email addresses. Users can simply start typing someone’s name into the “To” bar and Outlook searches the LVC directory.
Additionally, students have the ability to schedule meetings with advisors, professors and other students with the calendar feature by sending a request.

OneDrive is also a great feature and is essentially Microsoft’s version of Google Drive. It allows students to upload files or create an Office document within OneDrive. Students can then share the document with anyone in the LVC directory or organize documents in folders for themselves. OneDrive offers 1 TB of storage.

Groups and SharePoint are great apps to utilize if a student is working on a group project. Both Groups and SharePoint allow a user to select students to share and edit documents with. Users can also chat using Conversations, create a notebook, and link third party services using Connectors.

For more information on how to use Office 365 or to set up one’s account, visit the Office of Information Technology in Clyde A. Lynch Memorial Hall, Suites 004 and 005, or email solutions@lvc.edu.