Office 365 Success Stories

At least twice a month, Administrative Assistant Loraine Adal would find herself in 'email jail' – when her inbox reaches its limit and she is unable to send any messages.

"On those mornings, I am freaking out, staring at my computer and thinking 'please, please, please send!'" she says. "It's a huge setback for me and the Executive Director I support."

Then she learned about Office 365 (O365), and with it, an increase of email storage space to 50 GB.

For staff like Loraine, this will be a considerable increase. Today, 98 percent of UHN staff have a mailbox size of 1 GB or less and regularly face the same challenges with email jail.

"Cleaning out your email is truly a process which is unrealistic and not practical for my work," she says. "I'm just so happy I can focus on my work without this hindrance."

Jeff Baine, manager of Telehealth, is no stranger to the challenges of scheduling meetings and booking rooms across UHN.

He oversees the UHN Telehealth Program, which enables patients across in Ontario & across Canada to virtually meet and consult with physicians and other health clinicians over secure videoconferences, rather than travelling potentially far distances for a hospital site.

"Many patient programs, including the transplant program at UHN, require careful follow-up meetings with patients conducted through Telehealth," he explains. "As you can imagine, I'm constantly on my email, booking rooms across the hospital. Previously, we didn't have access to all rooms at UHN so there would be this whole other step to get this done."

This extra step involves requesting another administrative staff book the room, waiting for their response, and then connecting the room to a Telehealth videoconferencing system – a process which could take days.

Then Jeff moved to Office 365 (O365).

With O365, Jeff can now complete the scheduling and technical connections in a single day and no longer needs his team to coordinate a single room booking with other administrative staff.

Scott Patterson, Director of Facilities and Redevelopment Infrastructure, says his work often requires him to move at "300 miles per hour."

"My 'office' is wherever my laptop and phone are," he says. "I'm always on the go, sending and receiving messages and my Microsoft Outlook application can't always keep up."

Scott says there was one tool which finally matched his speed – the new O365 Dashboard.

The Dashboard is the new tool for accessing email, calendar and Skype for Business. Like UHN Webmail, it is available from any Internet browser.

Even though he has the Outlook application on his laptop, Scott says the O365 Dashboard is a better experience. He says the new email interface never lags and allows him to open attachments faster than before.

"Now, my team just knows me as 'the browser guy'," he says. "The Dashboard is all I want to use to access my emails from now on."