Office 365 and Email for Student Employees - see what has changed in 2016

Students are now part of the same Office 365 environment used by faculty and staff.

What has changed for student employees and their supervisors?

• Incoming students will only be given one Office 365 account, which includes a mailbox. It will be in the @wwu.edu environment rather than the @students.wwu.edu environment, therefore, incoming students will not have @students.wwu.edu addresses. Since Banner will have students’ correct email addresses, systems that rely on Banner and LDAP to query student email addresses (e.g., Canvas, BullsEye) will route mail correctly.
• New student employees will no longer receive separate employee mailboxes (First.Last@wwu.edu). They will only have one WWU mailbox and their email address will be username@wwu.edu. However, we will not take away a First.Last@wwu.edu email address from active students who currently have them. For existing student employees, First.Last@wwu.edu will remain as a proxy address for their @wwu.edu mailbox.
• Requests to provide access to shared departmental mailboxes and Outlook distribution lists for new student employees will be processed more quickly because we will no longer have to create a student employee mailbox in the @wwu.edu environment, which is required for this type of access. Students will already be in our environment before they become employees!
• Departments will also be able to add students to departmental Office 365 Groups without the need to first request an employee mailbox.

Actions for Student Employees and their Supervisors

The biggest change for student employees will be the consolidation of their student and work email into a single mailbox. We recommend that employees and employers consider the following:

• Departments are encouraged to have departmental shared mailboxes for student employee functions. Employers canrequest a shared mailboxto be used by one or more employees.
• If students do use their personal email for work, they may choose from a number of options to help them differentiate work email from student email. These include inserting a separate signature block for work-related messages, creating a separate folder for work-related messages, and creating rules to automatically handle work-related messages that are regular and have a distinct enough pattern.
  • We will soon publish a video that demonstrates a few options for keeping your mailbox organized, but feel free to contact the Help Desk for advice. We recognize that different departments have different needs, and we are happy to work with you to address any challenges you or your workgroup encounters.
• Replace @students.wwu.edu with @wwu.edu in your online and print publications to avoid confusion. While username@students.wwu.edu will be forwarded to username@wwu.edu through Winter quarter 2017 for current students, incoming students will be reachable only at username@wwu.edu.
• If you have shared a file or folder from OneDrive for Business with a student using their username@students.wwu.edu email address, you will also need to share it with their username@wwu.edu address.