Project Frequently Asked Questions
Project Overview
Moving to the Microsoft Office 365 suite of services brings many important benefits! Here are just a few:
Increased Collaboration
Bringing students, faculty, and staff together in the Microsoft environment will upgrade your ability to work and communicate with everyone at Villanova! Bringing your email into Office 365 will increase functionality with other Microsoft Office 365 tools, like OneDrive or unified calendaring, providing seamless integration and smoother user experience.
Stronger Cybersecurity
With student email in the Microsoft cloud, Villanova will have better ability to block malicious activity – preventing more phishing and scam emails from reaching student inboxes – while also being able to better guarantee important emails make it to your inbox without going to Junk.
Note: Multi-factor authentication will be required for all student O365 email accounts.
Prepare VU Students for the Workforce
95% of Fortune 500 companies use the Microsoft Office 365 ecosystem. Thus, recent graduates are faced with learning Outlook, Teams, OneDrive and other Microsoft tools when starting their careers. Introducing our students to the Microsoft environment during their higher education experience will better equip students to embark on their professional careers.
As part of the planning for this project, Villanova engaged market researchers, professional service providers, and over two dozen other campuses to learn from the successes and failures of other schools. For the schools that chose to perform migrations during the semester, it led to high levels of frustration and confusion for students and faculty. By performing this upgrade before the start of the Spring 2023 semester, we can ensure that the email migration does not cause unnecessary interruptions or confusion during the academic semester.
Since your official Villanova email account will be inaccessible on the day of your migration, 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.
I’m a Student:
Yes. Your email account will remain the same during this migration project.
Yes. Your VUID credentials (including your password) will remain unchanged during this project.
Similar to your current 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 new @villanova.edu credentials. 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
Villanova will send official emails to your @villanova.edu email address. We encourage students to use their official Villanova email account when communicating with faculty, staff, and other students. If you choose to send to/from an external email address, we cannot guarantee the successful delivery of important email communications between you and Villanova faculty/staff. By using your official Villanova email account, we can also provide better security to protect you from phishing attacks, such as the fraudulent student research opportunity scam that was sent to students in Spring and Fall.
This project will not impact the life of accounts. Most students will have access to their @villanova.edu account for a period of 1 year past their graduation. Law School students will maintain access to their @villanova.edu account for a period of two years to satisfy requirements for extended data retention. As part of your graduation, you will be asked if you want to opt-in for creating an @alum.villanova.edu account that can be retained beyond the 1/2-year period post-graduation.
This project will not impact your ability to login/access Blackboard for courses. Since your email address is not changing, emails from Blackboard to your email account will not be impacted by this project either. When submitting assignments, you will be able to submit your content from OneDrive, similar to how you have submitted documents from Google Drive previously.
As part of migrating your email/contacts/calendar between January 3-9, 2023, your Google Drive will be made read-only. However, the contents of your Google Drive and Photos will remain available to you in read-only mode until March 10, 2023. At that time, all access to your Google Drive and Photos will be removed and your content will be permanently deleted from Villanova's Google tenant as part of decommissioning the services.
Absolutely! Below are links to multiple step-by-step guides by Microsoft on how to configure your email clients on iOS and Android devices.
- Outlook for Android
- Android built-in apps
- Outlook for Apple iOS
- Apple Mac Mail app
I’m an Alumnus:
No. As part of the project, your current @villanova.edu email address will be decommissioned and a new @alum.villanova.edu account will be created. You will need to update any services/accounts you have tied to your current email account to point to your new Alumni email account.
No. Your password will need to be updated as part of the creation of your new email account.
Similar to your previous 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 new @alum.villanova.edu credentials. If you are off-campus, you may 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
As part of the decommissioning process of your former @villanova.edu account in November 2022, your access to Google Drive and Photos was permanently revoked.
Absolutely! Below are links to multiple step-by-step guides by Microsoft on how to configure your email clients on iOS and Android devices.
- Outlook for Android
- Android built-in apps
- Outlook for Apple iOS
- Apple Mac Mail app
I’m a Faculty or Staff:
Almost all Villanova faculty and staff are already using Microsoft Office 365 (Outlook, OneDrive, Teams) for their email, calendaring, and collaboration tools. For the handful of faculty/staff who have email accounts in both Google Workspace and Microsoft Office 365, you will be receiving targeted emails to schedule time for migrating your content.
The impact of this project for faculty/staff is that you will now be on the same email and calendar service as your students; making it easier to see/schedule meetings and guarantee delivery of critical email interactions between your accounts.
Please note that if you use Google Analytics or Custom Search tools, your access to those tools will persist.
This will be unimpacted by this change. We would still encourage you to ask students to use their official Villanova account when emailing with you, as we can ensure emails can be reliably delivered between two Villanova email accounts. When they use personal email accounts to communicate with you, they significantly increase the risk of their emails going to your Junk, your email going to their Junk, or emails either direction being undelivered.
Since email addresses for students will not change as part of this project, emails that were sent to your students before should continue to be received by them at the same email address. What IS changing as part of this project is that the students email accounts will move out of the Google platform and into the same Microsoft platform you currently use. If you are using any email tools/services that are specifically configured for Google, you may need to update your tool/service in early January to ensure the successful delivery of emails.
What About My Google Data:
When email/calendar/contacts will be migrated the week of January 3-9, 2023, your Google Drive will be changed to be read-only until March 10, 2023. After March 10, 2023, your access to Google Apps and your documents will be permanently revoked.
So while you will maintain access to your Google Apps (Docs/Sheets/Slides) between January and March, you will only be able to view your existing documents; you will not be able to modify existing content or create new content within Google Apps.
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.
Please note that if you have offline emails/archives that are not save up to GMail in Google's cloud, those offline emails will not be migrated over.
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.
Please note that we will be migrating your saved Google contacts. This does not include auto-filled addresses that you email but have not saved as a contact. If you have important contacts you want to save and ensure get migrated over, please ensure to save those addresses to your Google Contacts BEFORE January 1, 2023.
As part of migrating your email/contacts/calendar between January 3-9, 2023, your Google Drive will be made read-only. However, the contents of your Google Drive and Photos will remain available to you in read-only mode until March 10, 2023. At that time, all access to your Google Drive and Photos will be removed and your content will be permanently deleted from Villanova's Google tenant as part of decommissioning the services.
Yes! The easiest way to do this is by using the Google Takeout tool. Google Takeout is a free tool that allows users to export data from their Google account to a downloadable archive file. Students can use Google Takeout to assist them in creating an offline backup of their Google account ahead of the migration, transfer some/all of their content to their Villanova-provided Office 365 account, or transfer some/all of their content into their personally-owned Google Workspace account.
Detailed instructions on how to use Google Takeout can be found at: Google Takeout Instructions.
If you are ready to use Google Takeout today to generate a backup, you can do so by visiting https://takeout.google.com.
Important: You must archive/migrate content from your Google Drive and Photos BEFORE March 10, 2023.
