All City staff and students have a Microsoft Office 365 account, this enables you to access your email and calendar and offers a range of benefits including the option to download Microsoft Office on up to 5 of your own devices. In addition to this, Office 365 comes with a variety of other features including One Drive for Business, Skype for Business, Yammer, Delve, Clutter and Office 365 Video.
The tools are freely available to our staff and students and you can access them easily by logging into email.city.ac.uk and clicking on the box of squares in the top left of your screen. As more tools become available, you will notice they are added to the menu.
What are these tools?
One Drive for Business
One drive for business is a cloud storage and virtual office system in which you can store, edit and share your documents. For more information see our article: Unlimited Storage with One Drive
Skype for Business (Lync)
Skype of Business (known as Lync in some operating systems) allows you to communicate and collaborate with colleagues via instant messaging, voice and video calls and screen sharing. It is integrated with your calendar, enabling your colleagues to see your availability without needing to view your calendar.
Yammer
Similar to Facebook, Yammer is a company social networking site allowing staff and students to share news and information with the rest of the University. You will easily be able to find out what has been happening around the University, respond to other people’s updates, and update the University with your own news.
Yammer also gives you a simple and easy way to praise your colleagues for good work, allows you to poll other Yammer users to quickly survey opinions, and allows you to create your own groups.
Delve
Microsoft Delve is an innovative system that allows you to access information and news relevant to your particular field of work. Delve assesses the type of work you are involved in, and surfaces publicly available documents and information that your colleagues have been working on.
As well as bringing you information and events relevant to you, Delve also helps you stay connected with your colleagues. Simply type in the name of a colleague and see what they’re working on, and what’s trending around them. Delve makes it easier than ever to keep up to date with your colleagues and your field.
With the introduction of Delve, it becomes more important than ever to ensure that you are only saving public documents in your ‘Shared with everyone’ folder in One Drive for Business. To keep sensitive information private, make sure that you store it in your personal folder.
Office 365 Video
Office 365 Video is a new feature allowing you to share videos with either selected colleagues or the whole university. Uploading your videos is as simple as dragging and dropping them into the video folder. Then, all you need to do is give them a name and a description and the service can take care of the rest.
Clutter
You may have noticed a new feature in your inbox called Clutter. Clutter detects patterns in the emails you read and the ones you ignore, and uses this to take unimportant items and store them in a separate folder, which you can review later. Clutter will prompt you once a week to check your clutter folder, to help you keep on top of your email.
Clutter is different from your junk mail, as it is personal to you. It uses the way you deal with your emails to work out which ones are important to you. If you always delete emails from a certain sender or with a specific subject, it will learn that you don’t need them and move future emails to your clutter folder.
Want to learn more about any of these tools?
Please contact ittraining@city.ac.uk who will be happy to arrange training sessions or demonstrations for you and/or your team.
