Keeping you up to date with where we are at so far in the Microsoft Office 365 deployment for ship and shore…
What’s been happening this week?
This week onboard Ship: We have completed a pilot with all of our Onboard IT Technicians/Officers on Monday 6 September, which means that today (09/09/21) we are rolling out behind the scenes software to Azura to prepare for the ship to receive Outlook and Teams and will follow a deployment plan to install this ship by ship. The next ship to receive the installation is Ventura on 13/09/21.
This week Shoreside: We are working through the Microsoft Office 365 Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint & OneNote) installation for Carnival House. Still to receive this include our Mac Users, Mumbai and the QM2 Refit Team. Our Cognos users will remain on the current version of Excel, as the version of Cognos we use only supports Office 2007. Once Cognos has been upgraded later this year, we will be able to upgrade users to the latest version of Office.
Action Point: Please ask in your teams if you have any Mac Users and email us at O365@carnivalukgroup.com to let us know so that we can make sure we identify all Mac users. (We have reached out and asked people to let us know if they are Mac users but haven’t received many responses – this may be right – but would appreciate your support in finding out if you have any Mac users in your teams please so we can cross reference with our list.)
General updates & Useful things to know
Training Material: All training materials including videos, quick start guides, detailed guides and support are available are at this link.
Project Time Line: We have received lots of questions around the project timeline and we are working with the leadership team to get some comms out to you on this very soon. We’ll email you as soon as we can with an update. As a guide we are planning to deploy Outlook in October, with the likelihood that you as Change Champions will be identified as early adopters as you were for the Office Suite.
Lessons Learned: Following the roll out of the Microsoft Office 365 Suite – Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote we have learned some valuable tips which have helped us improve the roll out. If you would like to read all lessons learned please click here.
Roll out emails: As you are part of our pilot group it’s very likely when we send out comms to roll out to the rest of the business you may also receive these emails. Please ignore if you have already installed software or completed the action we are asking for support with.
Access Databases: A reminder that Access databases are out of scope for phase 1.
What’s coming next?
Outlook Deployment: We are planning to start to deploy Outlook to our Project Team and Pilot groups during October. You will receive further comms as we progress this and we will let you know as soon as we have confirmed dates from the Project Team who are currently working through pre-deployment build and test.
Shared Mailboxes: When we deploy Outlook your personal email box will transfer to Outlook. Please note that for a while your shared mailboxes will continue to remain in Lotus Notes where you will be able to receive and reply to emails as you do now. We appreciate that this may add a further complication to your working day and would ask you to start to consider if any local changes are required with your teams to accommodate this.
Is there something you’d like to know?
If there is something you would like to see covered in a weekly update please email us at: O365@carnivalukgroup.com and let us know and we’ll include in the next available update.