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 rolling out behind the scenes software to the fleet to receive Outlook and Teams to all ships excluding Queen Victoria. A problem was found with QV’s distribution list which has meant we have had to delay her roll out to next week.
This week Shoreside: We have been investigating a process for our Mac users to install Microsoft Office themselves – this will be communicated as soon as we have finalised the process.
All shoreside colleagues should now have access to the Office 365 suite (excluding Cognos & Mac users and our QM Refit Team.) There was a slight delay in rolling this out as it was found that our server could only deploy a limited number of users per day.
Action: If you hear of anyone in your team who doesn’t have the 0365 suite yet (and they are not a Cognos or Mac user, or a member of the QM Refit Team) please email us at: 0365@carnivalukgroup.com. We do get a high volume of emails so please be patient we will respond ASAP.
General updates & Useful things to know
Training Material: We will be offering training sessions for Outlook and Teams and we will share the dates with you as soon as they are available, so that you can choose which session is best for you to join.
All training materials including videos, quick start guides, detailed guides and support are available are at this link. Please start to have a look at the training materials to familiarise yourself, and encourage your teams to do this too. Spread the word!
Project Time Line: An update from Andrew Wyres
Andrew Wyres – acting CIO shared this message with the ELT and Senior Leadership Team this week.
We are currently in progress of the Microsoft Office 365 Suite (Word, Excel, PowerPoint & OneNote) for Carnival House, Hamburg and our Fleet. We expect this work to be completed by the end of September. The Office Upgrade has been accompanied by several training sessions and the production of collateral through links on The INSIDER to support your teams in getting the best out of their new version of Office.
We are preparing to deploy Outlook, Teams and OneDrive (the final component for Phase 1) to our Project Team and Pilot groups over the next two weeks followed by the Fleet and Shore during October. As you are aware the need to complete the roll-out by October is driven by ABG security and compliance and as a result the schedule is quite aggressive. We will have some issues during the Lotus Notes to Outlook conversion due to the variety of use cases, however we have additional support available to help resolve these through the roll-out. Please remember that some of your team may need to work on two mail platforms concurrently as Shared Mailboxes will remain on Lotus Notes until after all personal e-mail boxes have been migrated.
We have created pilot groups to transition early to help us measure conversion rates and impact informing the post implementation support required. Fleet users will be migrated on a ship by ship basis. Our Shore users will be migrated alphabetically by forename (if not in a pilot group). This was chosen instead of by functional groups as it provides natural resilience (migrations occurring gradually over a number of days rather than in a single phase). This allows your teams time to adjust, take advantage of the training provided and learn from each other. We expect all users to have been moved across by the end of October.
As with the Office Suite we are creating a library of training materials and will be running training sessions to help our users familiarise themselves with the new Technology. Live sessions will be available, but we would encourage everyone to take advantage of the training materials and videos that will be made available online which enables users to familiarise themselves in their own time. Support will be provided by our IT Service Desk and Learning Team – more details to follow in The INSIDER.
We are looking forward to concluding this first phase of the migration so we can start to maximise and exploit the new tools available to us all, making collaboration easier and more efficient across the brands. SharePoint and other components will continue to be deployed going forward as part of further phases in early 2022 but we will advise on those at a later time.
What’s coming next?
Outlook Deployment: We are planning to start to deploy Outlook to our Project Team next week. Following Post Implementation testing we will then look to roll out to our Pilot groups including you our change champions. This is likely to be from early 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. We are preparing a document that will give you a list of things that you need to do to prepare for your migration to Outlook and we’ll share this with you next week.
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.