Coming in November: DWAN Office 2013 will be upgraded to Office 365

November 21, 2022 - Defence Stories

Starting in November 2022, your Microsoft Office 2013 suite is being upgraded to the Microsoft Office 365 suite. This upgrade only affects workstations connected to the Defence Wide Area Network (DWAN) and is being automatically deployed by National Baseline Integration Services (NBIS) in a phased roll out over several months. You will be notified one week in advance of the upgrade with a pop-up on your workstation.

Before the upgrade

You must have an active Defence 365 account to use the new Microsoft Office 365 suite.

If you have never signed in to your Defence 365 account, you can start with the Defence 365 onboarding guides. 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 service desk.

IMPORTANT NOTES:

• There is no requirement to transfer data from DWAN SharePoint (ACIMS and SWA), network share or personal (Q:) drives to One Drive or SharePoint Online. 
• NBIS has conducted integration testing with many enterprise Life Cycle Applications Manager (LCAM) such as RDIMS, GCDocs, DRMIS and Monitor Mass to ensure they function properly with Office 365.
• All files created using Office 2013 will be compatible with Office 365, with the exception of .ACCDE 32-bit files (you are now leaving the Government of Canada website)
• Certain Outlook settings, like your signature block, might not transfer over. Back up your Outlook signature by copy and pasting it into a Word doc and saving it.
• If you do experience problems, please submit a ticket in Assyst so that it can be assigned to the proper application owner for troubleshooting and resolution.

What is Microsoft Office 365 Suite?

Microsoft Office 365 suite is the latest Office apps like Word, PowerPoint, Excel, Outlook, and One Note.

Benefits of Office 365 compared to Office 2013

Full functionality: You can now work on Defence 365 documents using the Office desktop applications on your DND workstation instead of being limited to the web versions.

Real-Time Co-authoring (Word, Excel, PowerPoint): Save a file to OneDrive or SharePoint and others can now work on it with you. Unlike older Office versions, now multiple people can edit the same document at the same time.

Better PowerPoint presentations: Use a simple keyboard shortcut (Ctrl+P) to turn your mouse into a laser pointer during your PowerPoint presentations. 

Store, track and restore previous versions of files: You can now see a record of all changes made in a document, with the date/time and who made the change. You can view, delete, and restore any version of that file that is stored in OneDrive and SharePoint.

For more information on Microsoft Office 365 Suite, including what you need to do to prepare, read the complete Guide found on the D365 Portal (you are now leaving the Government of Canada website).