Microsoft Office and the EU Community

Office 365 Licensing Change as of January 2025

At the end of January 2025, Microsoft decided (unilaterally) to retire / suspend a specific type of license EU was providing to some of our faculty and students called the Office 365 A1 PLUS.  The 'PLUS' part allowed the EU user accessing this license to use www.office.com AND an installed version of some Office products.  Users previously assigned to these O365 PLUS licenses are now seeing error messages when they try to open their installed Office products, indicating that the license will be deactivated some time around February 23rd, 2025.  This notification, from the installed program, does not lie.

What DOES LIE, is if you get a similar message in an EMAIL.  In the past our users have been notified of fictitious Microsoft Office changes, in an attempt to scam them into giving up their EU login information.  If it's in an EMAIL, it's a scam!  If it's on your computer when you open Microsoft Word, Excel, etc., it's legitimate.

What to do now . . . That depends on who owns the computer on which you are trying to use an installed Microsoft product.  If the device you are seeing this notice on is owned by EU, please open a new IT support ticket to have the erroneous version of Office 365 replaced with a 'key-activated' version.  If this device is NOT owned by EU, you will need to access the ONLINE-ONLY version of Office provided to you by EU via www.office.com (as thoroughly documented below), OR, purchase your own subscription to the installed Microsoft products on your computer.  (More information on purchasing a Microsoft 365 Personal subscription -- with a discount for educational users -- is provided in the the 'Alternatives' section below.)

Most academic exercises in college involve creating documents, spreadsheets, presentation decks, etc.  For decades the de facto standard for producing those types of things -- for better or worse -- has been the Microsoft Office productivity suite.

In the past, Microsoft would encourage their customers, big and small, to install the Microsoft Office suite onto their individual computers.  However, since the advent of 'Google Docs' (and the 21st century), Microsoft has changed the roadmap for their Office productivity suite to an online model.  Yes, you can still install the product on your own machine, (just not with an EU-provided license.)  The license EU offers to students (and most adjunct faculty) is an online-only license for www.office.com.

To access this version (license) of Microsoft Office, one simply needs to visit www.office.com and login with their EU email address and current EU password.  Unlike most systems here at EU, this system DOES require the full email address, not just the part before the @eastern.edu.  Also, previous iterations of the office.com website did have a 'Sign-up' process; however, those are outdated methodologies.  As soon as you are fully registered, you will have access to www.office.com, with your EU email address and password.

Important Note:  If you do have trouble logging in to office.com, please DO NOT try and change your password on office.com or microsoft.com.  The only website to manage your EU password is EU's Password website (password.eastern.edu).

Limitations

Functionality:  We are not currently aware of any limitations of the online version of Microsoft Office, or any other Microsoft products tied to your EU-linked Microsoft account.  Data science products like Power BI are also available online, if you poke around enough on www.office.com.  (Although, you eventually may end up on microsoft.com and/or azure.com, both of which are Microsoft systems.)

Brightspace:  Unfortunately, at this time, there is no 'integration' between the Microsoft Office website and Brightspace.  Meaning, if you have a 'workbook' to work on, you will need to Download from Brightspace, then Upload the document to www.office.com, to work on the DOCX or DOTX (template file) from Microsoft Office.  Once complete, download the updated DOCX file from office.com, and upload back to Brightspace to complete the assignment.  (For this reason, EU IT would recommend faculty not constrain their Brightspace courses to Microsoft Office files / formats.)

Web Browsers (avoid Safari and FireFox):  Microsoft recommends using their Edge web browser with the Office.com website.  EU IT has found that Google Chrome is generally usable as well.  However, both the Safari web browser, commonly found on Apple / Mac devices, and Mozilla's open-source web browser called FireFox have been known to have issues with the Office.com website.

Alternatives

Other ONLINE Productivity Apps:  Because this version of Microsoft Office is online, it must compete with other 'Online Productivity Suites', like Google Docs.  Google Docs is a comparable and fully capable productivity suite for creating documents, spreadsheets and even slide decks.  (Prezi is also a good alternative to Microsoft PowerPoint.)  However, your instructor will have the final say as to what type of file they require you to submit your work in.  (Tenured Faculty would have access to a more expensive, installable, version of Microsoft Office (on their EU-issued computer), and therefore may require you to submit the work in a Word Document (DOCX), or Excel file (XLSX) format, which is Downloadable from www.office.com.)

Purchase Your Own Microsoft Subscription (with an Educational Discount):  Admittedly, working with a Brightspace course constrained to Microsoft Office files, is very cumbersome, via Office online.  The best option in this situation is to purchase your own subscription to the Microsoft products installed on your computer.  There is good news in this regard.  As someone with an @eastern.edu email address, you can get a DISCOUNT on that purchase.  The subscription you will want to acquire is called Microsoft 365 Personal, which is a subscription to online Office, that it is said to include an activation process for installed Microsoft products.  https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/college-student-pricing

To purchase this license a user (not using an EU-owned device) needs to do the following:

• The purchase process starts with a request for an email address.  This email address must NOT be your EU email address; it must be a Personal email address.  This gets the 'purchase' you are making tied to your Personal email address.
• Eventually the purchase process will ask for payment information AND an educational email.  This is a second request for an email address, and THIS is where you provide your EU email address.  It is sort of like a 'coupon code' for your personal Microsoft purchase.
• Once you have made your purchase, you will Activate the installed product on your computer with your Personal email address, not your EU email address.

Again, this is an agreement between you, personally, and Microsoft; and EU IT does not provide support for any of this.  Furthermore, if you lose access to your EU email address, because you have left EU for some reason, you will probably lose this discount on YOUR Microsoft account, and Microsoft will start to charge you the full price of their Microsoft 365 Personal product subscription.

If you have any additional questions or concerns, please contact the Helpdesk via the Helpdesk website.