Office 365 – VA Upgrades to the Latest Business Applications

OIT’s roll-out of Office 365 ProPlus in 2017 and 2018 has successfully brought VA employees the latest versions of Microsoft productivity applications like Outlook, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, and Access, as well as Skype for Business. An upcoming migration of email inboxes to the cloud-based Exchange Online will further enhance VA employee productivity, increasing mailbox storage space to 100 gigabytes while adding significant email attachment capacity.

Over the course of the past 18 months, OIT has deployed upgrades to Office 365 ProPlus for more than 400,000 devices servicing employees and contractors around the country. A high intensity effort requiring careful execution to avoid disrupting the services VA employees provide to Veterans, the Office 365 ProPlus team is already getting feedback from satisfied customers. “Just want to give a shout out to your OIT support staff for a great job of making it extremely easy to upgrade our MS Office software through self-service,” a senior VA executive recently wrote OIT Executive in Charge Camilo Sandoval. “The instruction they provided was easy to follow and worked perfectly. This is the best experience that I have had in getting VA software updates.”

As the Department continues pursuing IT modernization, customer service experiences like these remain central to the focus of our work in OIT — collaborating with our VA business partners to create the best experience for all Veterans.