From the 1st October the University of Reading will be providing access to Microsoft Office 365 through Microsoft Student Advantage.
Microsoft
6 months until end of Windows XP support.
The end of Windows XP and Office 2003 support from Microsoft is now only 6 months away. As in our previous news item, from April 2014, there will no longer be any operating system or security updates made available from Microsoft. Continue reading
Microsoft Office 2010 updates
We have started to force the Office 2010 Service Pack 2 installation to all our managed PCs since 29 August.
Once the install has finished, the next time that Outlook is opened, you may experience sluggish opening of your InBox, if a re-index for Search occurs.
Also, PCs may run more slowly whilst the install is running.
Office 2010 SP2 has been available since end of July and contains significant bug and performance fixes. We normally push current Office SP to desktops around this time every year.
The only known issues with SP2 are not relevant, as they apply only to Server 2003.
Summer upgrades 9 July 2013
We had two major pieces of work that took place yesterday to upgrade the services we supply to students at the University. Continue reading
Microsoft Windows XP support
IT Services will not support Windows XP beyond Microsoft’s withdrawal of security update support after 8 April 2014. This also applies to Office 2003. Continue reading
Microsoft Office 2013 & Office 365
ITS have received a number of queries regarding Microsoft Office 2013 and Office 365.
Neither of these versions of Office are compatible with operating systems as old as Windows XP or Windows Vista.
As a staff member or student, you can obtain a Windows 8 upgrade via www.theultimatesteal.co.uk but we recommend that you check the system requirements and specifications carefully.
IT Services do not recommend installing either of these versions of Office software on University owned devices at this time as we are still investigating core systems compatibility.
As soon as we have more information regarding this, we will update this article
Advice on Office 2013 Preview
As most of you probably know, the Office 2013 Preview has been out for over a week now for testing by the general public. However, we do not recommend that you run Outlook 2013 Preview. Continue reading
Changes to SkyDrive capacity on readingLive
Microsoft have announced that they are making changes to the way that SkyDrive is providing personal cloud storage for students who are using readingLive. Continue reading
Staff Mailbox moves
As part of our response to recent email problems, IT Services will be moving staff mailboxes to new storage hardware. Due to the number of mailboxes this process will take several months to complete. Continue reading
Website migrations from IIS6
Microsoft is ending support for IIS6 functionality and this means that IT Services will be shutting down servers running IIS6 in July. IT Services has scheduled the transfer of current IIS6 web sites to a new server during May and June. Continue reading