Upgrade now available to Office 365 Applications on the DWAN

October 11, 2022 - Defence Stories

The Microsoft Office applications on the Defence Wide Area Network (DWAN) are now available for upgrade from Office 2013 to Office 365.

Office 2013 (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook, OneNote) will be ending its lifecycle and will no longer be supported by Microsoft after May 1, 2023.

The upgrade to the Office suite on DWAN will be rolled out in a phased approach (see schedule below).  Once upgraded, you will be required to login using your D365 Account to access the Office 365 suite. 

The upgrade of Office 365 on DWAN does not change the data classification of D365 environment. At this time, D365 is only intended to process, store and transmit information to Protected A (PA) data.

Rollout Schedule

The deployment of Office 365 is as follows:

• July 2022 – Service Management Centres (SMCs) gained early access to the new version.
• September 2022 – Users have been able to choose to upgrade to Office 365 at any time, via their software centre. To minimize disruption, it is recommended that the installation is to be launched at the end of the workday as the installation process can take up to one (1) hour to complete.
• November 2022 – The upgrade will be automatically deployed to all workstations over the course of several months.
• All DWAN workstations and laptops must be upgraded by 1 May, 2023.

For more information, please refer to the Office 365 Desktop Applications on DWAN user guide. (Available via D365).

How to use Office 365

Ensure you have an active D365 account before installing Office 365. To begin using Office 365 on the DWAN, you must install it via the software centre and sign into at least one Office 365 application (Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook) on your DWAN computers using your D365 credentials (i.e. @ecn.forces.gc.ca, @reserves.forces.gc.ca, @jdcp.forces.gc.ca). You will need to sign in to at least one Office 365 application every 30 days to keep your Office applications activated.

Forgot your password? We can help!

If you forgot your D365 password, please visit the My Info Self-Service Portal (accessible only on the National Defence network) to recover your D365 password or call your help desk.

Don’t have a D365 account? Get onboard!

If you have never signed into your Defence 365 account, now is the time, please see the Defence 365 Onboarding Guides to get started.