Microsoft 365 at CUNI MFF

All employees and students of our university can use services available within Microsoft 365 (previously known as Office 365).

The options available to a particular user in M365 depend on the type of license they have been assigned. At MFF, users are overwhelmingly assigned one of the following list of license types:

• Student license A3 (Office 365 A3 Student Use Benefit in Microsoft terminology)
• Employee license A3 (Office 365 Education A3 in Microsoft terminology)
• A1 license (Office 365 Education A1 in Microsoft terminology)

Detailed information about the possibilities available to users based on a given specific license type can be obtained on the Microsoft 365 Education pages. Simply put, A3 licenses allow the user to use both web (online) and desktop applications, while A1 licenses only allow work with web applications. Users with only an A1 licence are also limited (by the Charles University Computer Science Centre) to 100 GB of space on OneDrive.

Licenses are assigned to users automatically according to the following key:

• All persons with a student relationship with Charles University (i.e., also, doctoral students and lifelong learning students) are assigned an A3 student license.
• All employees (with the exception of those who are licensed under the previous point and those who do not use a computer for their work, such as some building management staff) are assigned an A3 employee license.
• All persons having a registered relationship with MFF, who do not have an assigned license according to one of the previous two points, are assigned an A1 license.

If, for some reason, the license assigned to the user is not sufficient, another license can be requested from the list given above. A necessary condition for processing such a request is the approval of the head of the department where the user works.

To log in to Microsoft 365, please use https://office365.cuni.cz/, where you will be redirected to the university authentication service (CAS), where you log in with your university account (as for SIS, etc.). Also, you can use https://portal.office.com/. Here, the Microsoft login page is shown, where to the login field fill any email address with the suffix cuni.cz (e.g., a@cuni.cz) and again you will be forwarded to CAS The Microsoft login page can also be shown if you access Microsoft 365 documents via direct links.

After logging in, Microsoft applications are available in online versions, including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook or Teams.

Each person with the A3 plan (see above) can install the desktop Office 365 applications on up to five PCs or Macs. A link for downloading these applications is shown on the Microsoft 365 homepage (shown only if you access the page on Windows). IT administrators can use the guide for deploying Office 365 apps.

As a part of Microsoft 365, there is an email account with 100 GB capacity for employees and 15 GB for students. The email account is created automatically when a person commences to be a student/employee of the university.

Mailboxes in the M365 system can have multiple addresses to which mail can arrive, depending on the relationships that users have within the Charles Univesity. For example, a user may be studying at the FoH and be simultaneously employed at the FoM&P and the FoS - each of these relationships can add another address to his/her mailbox. However, it is always the case that the inbox addresses UKČO@o365.cuni.cz and login_name@o365.cuni.cz work for all users (i.e. both staff and students) (the UKČO is the person's university number, you can find it on your student or staff ID card under your photo or in SIS).

All Charles University students, regardless of the faculty/faculties where they study, also have an address of the form name.surnameXYZ@student.cuni.cz (XYZ are the digits) and unless they have a faculty address set up (see below), this address not only works for receiving mail but is also used for sending. If a student needs to find out their address, they can do so in the web Outlook (click on their own name -> "View Account" in the top right, and the mailbox's email address will be listed in the bar containing also the name and surname). See also the document Discover Outlook.

Persons registered at the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics in the Amoeba system (usually employees) can also use faculty addresses of the form first_name.surname@matfyz.cuni.cz in M365. The address of the email account depends on the state of the personal faculty alias (see Dean's Directive no. 5/2017):

• If the user has the personal alias in a form first_name.surname@mff.cuni.cz (it can be set via updating personal information), then the address of the email account in Microsoft 365 is first_name.surname@matfyz.cuni.cz and this address is used the primary one (it is set for the From: field).
• Aside from the state of the personal alias, also the addresses personal_number@o365.cuni.cz and login_name@o365.cuni.cz work for receiving emails
• In the case the personal alias is not set, then the primary address is personal_number@o365.cuni.cz and it cannot be changed.
• Important:
  • Establishing the @matfyz.cuni.cz adresses has no effect to facutly systems outside Microsoft 365 — the personal alias first_name.surname@mff.cuni.cz works as up to now.
  • Also there are no effects to addresses @matfyz.cz.

The Outlook web service (a part of Microsoft 365) can be used to access the email. In Windows, the desktop Outlook program can be used too (see the Desktop applications section above). The guide how to connect Outlook to M365 service and some useful settings is available here. Also available is the document Discover Outlook for students. Also, any POP or IMAP clients can be used, e.g., Thunderbird (see the document How to set up Thunderbird for Microsoft 365). The configuration of such clients can be found in the help of the Outlook web service (tap the question mark icon at the top right and look for POP, IMAP, and SMTP settings).

Teams allow for easy team collaboration. It is possible to use it (not only) for distance education. It allows for creating groups (teams), sharing documents, chatting and also making videoconferences. A client application is available for most of the commonly used systems (Windows, Linux, Android, iOS), and it also can be used without any client from a browser.

Since the second semester of 2020/2021, the integration of Teams and SIS has been established. From SIS, it is possible to create a team for a particular course and automatically fill the team with students enrolled for the course (in SIS, the item "Subjects" → a particular course → "Microsoft Teams").

• Guides to use Teams (at the univerity page)
• Guides to use Teams (at muni.cz)

Each person with the A3 plan (see above) can install the mobile Office applications on up to five phones or tablets.

All data stored in Microsoft 365 (emails, files in Sharepoint and OneDrive,...) are physicaly stored in a Microsoft "cloud". At the university level, the Computer Science Center is responsible for administration. If necessary, you can contact faculty support at office365@matfyz.cuni.cz.

The A3 plan (which contains the Office desktop programs) is available since 1^st June 2021. If you own previously bought Office/Microsoft 365 license has been associated with the "university" account (personal_number@cuni.cz), then there is no need to do anything and everything works as previously. If the previous license has been be bought with another account, you should switch to the personal_number@cuni.cz account to use the faculty plan.

Charles University runs a special website dedicated to Microsoft 365 cloud services at the university.