In January 2023 the Co-op began migrating to MS365 for much of it's "office" functionality, things like email, calendaring and file sharing. As a board member, you will have collaborated with Co-op staff and other board members in the past using Sync for files, possibly Google docs, possibly zoom.

Going forward all of these will be phased out in favour of using this new MS365 environment. The instructions below describe what will happen to get you started in this new environment.

You will get an email invitation sent to the email address you regularly use in correspondence with the board/Co-op executive director. This invitation will be to join the BC Libraries Cooperative MS365 instance (and will come from either Kevin Millsip, Scott Leslie or Jonathan Schatz at the Coop, TBD).

Your own institution may well already use MS365. Or it may not. Either is fine, it just means there may be slightly different patterns to access the server, based on whether Microsoft thinks your email address is already associated with an existing MS365 account.

If your email address is already associated with MS365 (either because your institution licenses it or maybe because you used that email at some point in conjunction with another Microsoft product like Skype) then when you click on the invite email you receive you will be taken to a page and asked to log in with that existing account. Please do so, and then you will be redirected to a page which will ask you to agree to Co-op's terms (as this step is adding your existing account as a guest on the Co-op's MS365 tenant)

Upon accepting the terms, expect the browser to cycle a few times as it bounces around within MS365, eventually bringing a pop-up asking if you want to open Teams.

If you use and have the Teams client installed you could do this. However it might be less confusing if you say no and then chose to open the web version of Teams. This should open Teams but at first you may get an error message that you don't have access to a channel. Ignore that and check again, the Board team as well as the sub channels General, Finance and Governance should be there.

By going into those channels, you should see a documents tab. Those should be familiar based on what you were formerly seeing via Sync. You should now be able to open and edit any of these documents. Kevin Millsip will communicate any other ways in which the board will use Teams to collaborate going forward.

If your email address is not associated with MS365 via your institution nor used in conjunction with any other MS product, there is a slightly different workflow to access the board team site.

When you click on the link in the invite email you receive you will be taken to a page that asks you to generate a one time codee to login. This will result in a second email being sent containing a 6 digit code which you will then enter the Board teams site.

After you enter the code, expect the browser to cycle a few times as it bounces around within MS365, eventually bringing a pop-up asking if you want to open the Teams desktop client.

If you use and have the Teams client installed you could do this. However it might be less confusing if you say no and then chose to open the web version of Teams. This should open Teams but at first you may get an error message that you don't have access to a channel. Ignore that and check again, the Board team as well as the sub channels General, Finance and Governance should be there. By going into those channels, you should see a documents tab. Those should be familiar based on what you were formerly seeing via Sync. You should now be able to open and edit any of these documents. Kevin Millsip will communicate any other ways in which the board will use Teams to collaborate going forward.

As the board starts to explore working together in this environment they will find new ways of collaborating, but to begin we implemented one in particular we believe will help, email aliases for the board as a whole and the two working sub-committees, Governance and Finance. We have added all board members to the appropriate lists, so to send a message to them simply email any of the following:

• board@bc.libraries.coop
• board-governance@bc.libraries.coop
• board-finance@bc.libraries.coop

Long term, your access will likely be direct to specific documents via emailed links, however if you ever need to come back to the main Board Teams site, go to https://bit.ly/bclibrariescoop-board

In the event that you have any difficulties logging in to the Microsoft environment or the Teams site specifically, please email sysop@bc.libraries.coop with the subject "MS365 - [brief issue description here] " and describe the issue with as much detail as you can in the body of the message. Someone on the systems team will respond promptly and try to help fix the issue.