Question

To ask the hon. Member for Caithness, Sutherland and Easter Ross representing the House of Commons Commission, pursuant to his Answer of 24 June 2014, Official Report, column 134W, on computer software, what feedback has been received on the mechanics of the implementation of Microsoft 365 from (a) members of the Administration Committee and (b) other hon. Members.

In May Parliamentary ICT (PICT) piloted migrating Members' mailboxes to Microsoft 365. In this Members' pilot, PICT migrated 82 mailboxes, including the mailboxes of 10 hon. Members, their staff and 12 members of the House of Lords. One of the hon. Members involved in this pilot is a Member of the Administration Committee. PICT requested feedback on the migrations in an anonymous survey. Four people in the pilot survey reported a problem with the migration of their email. Because the survey was anonymous, it is not possible to say who responded to the survey.

A paper on the implementation of Microsoft 365, which included feedback from the survey, was presented to the Administration Committee for their meeting on 16 June. A member of the Committee expressed serious concern that Office 365 was not well received by users. The Chair of the Committee is also aware of written complaints from three other hon. Members about recent changes.

PICT began the migrations for other hon. Members and their staff on 22 June. By 4 July over 1,800 mailboxes assigned to hon. Members and their staff had been migrated.

The most common cause of a call to the service desk after the mailbox migration has been to request help to follow the process for logging into the new mail box for the first time. The second most common problem relates to mobile devices. Parliamentary email stops working on mobile devices until they are reconfigured to point to the new server after the migration. BlackBerry devices need to be physically reconfigured by PICT, and this process can take over an hour. Furthermore, it takes longer for personal BlackBerry devices than for BlackBerries issued by PICT. In addition, new security features have made it difficult to synchronise some android devices with mailboxes.

For those having a problem with their email, it is of course disruptive, and PICT have dedicated specialists on hand to assist.