Student Email Migration
From November 2022 through January 2023, Villanova University will be migrating our alumni and undergraduate student accounts from Google Workspace to Microsoft Office 365 email and collaboration services.
Over the span of the next two months - as part of our continued efforts to improve your technology experience - Villanova University will be transitioning opted-in alumni and all student accounts from their current Google Workspace (Gmail/GSuite) to the same Microsoft Office 365 (Outlook email and calendar, OneDrive, Teams) currently used by Villanova faculty, staff, and graduate students.
This account migration will significantly improve the calendaring and scheduling process between students and faculty, provide enhanced security and privacy features, and increase the storage capacity of all Villanova user accounts. UNIT will be migrating opted-in alumni email accounts in November 2022 and all undergraduate email accounts in January 2023.
How to Make the Switch
For undergraduate students, UNIT has partnered with a third-party vendor to facilitate the migration of your email, calendar, and contacts from your current Gmail account to your new Office 365 account during the week of January 3-9, 2023. As we get closer to the cutover dates, you will receive targeted emails detailing which day your account will be migrated, as well as registration for training sessions on the new email platform.
Content in your Google Drive and Google Photos services will be marked as read-only during your email account transition. Students will be given until Spring Break (March 10, 2023) to move their content out of Google. Please ensure you use these 3 months to migrate and back up the data in your Google Drive and Google Photos. After March 10, 2023, all content will be purged from the Villanova Google Workspace tenant.
Notification confirming the successful transition of your Villanova account will be sent to your alternate (not villanova.edu) email address. To ensure you receive this critical notification, please take this opportunity to confirm/update the alternate email address currently on file for your account. You can view and edit this information using the View and update my Personal information card in MyNova.
No direct action is needed from you to migrate your email account contents from Google to Microsoft. UNIT has partnered with a third-party vendor to facilitate the migration of your email, calendar, and contacts from your current Gmail account to your new Office 365 account during the week of January 3-9, 2023. During your specified cutover day, you will lose the ability to login to your Villanova email account for several hours. Any emails sent to you during that time will continue to come in without issue. We will send an email to your alternate email address to let you know your account has been successfully migrated. Upon receiving the confirmation email, we will need you to follow the provided directions to test logging into your account and to validate that nothing is missing.
Similar to your GMail account, you can login to check your email via multiple methods. The easiest and most straightforward will be to visit https://outlook.office.com, and sign-in with your VUID (userid@villanova.edu). If you are off-campus, you will be required to use DUO multifactor as part of the login process.
Below are links to several Quick Reference Guides for the most popular ways to check your newly transferred Villanova email account.
- Quick Reference Guide for using web to check your email (OWA)
- Quick Reference Guide for using Outlook on Mac to check your email
- Quick Reference Guide for using Outlook on Windows to check your email
- Quick Reference Guide for using Outlook on iOS to check your email
- Quick Reference Guide for using Outlook on Android to check your email
If you would like a quick tour of Microsoft Office 365, please take a virtual tour!
You can customize the way Outlook Web App (OWA) looks and how messages are displayed by applying themes and editing your message display settings.
To change your Theme:
- Click the Settings icon (gear icon)
- Click a theme you like (click on View All to see the full list)
- Select a theme by clicking on it to apply.
To change your display settings, Outlook offers multiple options:
- Light Mode
- Dark Mode
- Focused Inbox (automatically separates your most important emails using AI)
- Conversation View (select threaded email to be more similar to Gmail defaults)
- Reading Pane Location (choose to view preview below or the side of your Inbox)
- View all display customizations by Viewing all Outlook settings.