Accessing office.com using an MS A1 license (not relevant to students or employees)

Why are we changing licenses to ‘A1’?

Two things require us to reassign license types to individuals:

Original license type	Reason for the change

Original license
type

Reason for the change

A5

Only employees are eligible for A5 licenses. To comply with legal requirements related to our Microsoft license agreements, anyone who is not an employee but who currently uses an A5 license, will be issued an A1 license on February 3, 2025.

(except students, who have a different type)

A1 Plus

Microsoft no longer offers the A1 Plus type license type. Organizations like RRU are required to issue different licenses to remain legally compliant with license agreements.

We replaced A1 Plus license types with an A1 license type on December 9, 2024.

No action is required by you related to the license type change BUT this may impact you. You may need to change how you work with Office applications.

Q&A

No, it does not. You log into Moodle using your RRU Login + password. This change only affects the way you access Microsoft Office applications.

MS requires that all users of MS applications have an appropriate access license. These licenses also allow Microsoft to provide updates, security enhancements, and support for the tools we use daily.

RRU issues MS licenses to all students, staff, faculty, guests, etc. based on your role and needs to ensure that each person has appropriate authorized access to MS software and services.

You may be affected, depending on whether you used the license issued by RRU and even depending on how you used it.

There IS a change for you if:

There is no change for you if:

You previously downloaded and installed Office on your computer at home using the license assigned previously.

You use your own personal or company MS license on your non-RRU computer.

You use Office 365 through RRU’s license exclusively online.

If you previously installed Office on your computer using the RRU license, the installed version of Office will have many features disabled.

At this point, you must use the online version of Office 365 available at https://www.office.com/, accessible by using your RRU Login and password to login.

you can use https://www.office.com/ to open documents on your computer.
- see “How can I open a document previously stored on my C: drive?” below
- popup blockers may prevent this so you may need to adjust the blockers.
New documents will be created from https://www.office.com/ and saved to OneDrive online.
You can download these documents and can open the documents offline, but you will not be able to edit any documents with your local copy of Office 365.

The fastest way to tell if you are using a personal license or not is to open an Office app like Word, Excel, or PowerPoint and look in the upper right of the screen. You’ll see the name of whoever is logged in. Click on the little image (This could be a picture as shown below, or it may be your initials, etc.).

If you see “@royalroads.ca” in the area highlighted in yellow, you’re using an RRU license.

If you see gmail.com, outlook.com, hotmail.com, etc. showing there, you’re not currently logged in using an RRU license.

The new A1 license is primarily designed for lightweight, cloud-based use, which is optimal for educational environments that rely on internet connectivity and browser-based applications.

A1 Plus and/or A5 license characteristics

A1

allowed downloading & installing of Office apps
provides access to web versions of core Office apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote
provided 1TB storage space on OneDrive
supports collaboration and communication through Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange for email
provides access to other tools such as Sway, Forms, and Stream.
provides access to some applications like Access and Publisher

does not allow downloading and installing; must use apps online
provides access to web versions of core Office apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote
provides 100GB storage space on OneDrive
supports collaboration and communication through Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, and Exchange for email
provides access to other tools such as Sway, Forms, and Stream.

IT-Services Knowledge Base

Accessing office.com using an MS A1 license (not relevant to students or employees)

Why are we changing licenses to ‘A1’?

Q&A

How to Contact the Computer Services Department