For several years, the University of Oldenburg had enabled its students to register for the use of Microsoft's "Office 365 Education". The registration was to take place using the - email address in the long form for the domain uni-oldenburg.de, i.e. in the format (and not ...@uol.de).The licence allowed a time-limited study-related use of "Office 365 Education" on private end devices with connection to Microsoft cloud services (in particular storage space) during the studies at the University of Oldenburg or as long as the offer from Microsoft to our university remains unchanged. We have no influence on the selection of products provided by Microsoft.

Microsoft has now changed the offer that has existed for years:

• Since 01 February 2024, Microsoft has already been gradually reducing the storage space provided for each registered person in the cloud from 1 TerraByte to 100 GigaByte. If a storage volume greater than 100 GB is used at the time of the restriction, you will be informed that the limit has been exceeded with a note that changes can no longer be saved --> You can now only access the data read-only and, of course, download it to save it elsewhere.
• Microsoft has discontinued the A1 Plus licence plan on which the product licensing was based as of 1 August 2024. For enrolled students and alumni with accounts in the uni-oldenburg.de domain, access to data in Onedrive and the use of Microsoft 365 apps in the cloud will initially continue to be made possible by means of licences from the A1 plan, with a restriction to online use only. In the future, the use of A3 licences is planned, which will be assigned via a registration process on a university website (this is still being coordinated and is not yet available). A3 licences will then (again) enable the use of Microsoft 365 apps on the desktop. It should be noted that the storage space provided in Onedrive will be further limited to a value significantly less than 100 GB.
• Accounts that, contrary to our specifications, were not registered using the uni-oldenburg.de domain, i.e. in the form vorname.nachname@uni-oldenburg.de, but using ...@uol.de or other university email addresses, will no longer be usable by the end of July 2024 at the latest. We recommend that you back up your data to other storage locations in good time by downloading it.

We regret the imminent restriction of the usability of Microsoft products "Office 365 Education" during your studies.