The University has recently migrated to providing all students and researchers with a Microsoft account.  This includes the provision of a central email system with which to communicate with your advisors, peers, and research subjects, alongside other software in the Microsoft suite, detailed in this section.

Your University of Cambridge Microsoft account allows you to install Office 365 ProPlus software on your personal devices and gives you access to a 5TB OneDrive cloud-based file storage system.

To login into your University of Cambridge Microsoft account, simply navigate to the Microsoft portal and sign in with your @cam email address and UIS password.

Multi-factor authentication (MFA) adds a crucial layer of security to your University Microsoft account. It is also sometimes known as two-step verification or two-factor authentication (2FA). 

It has been added by IT Services to increase your security when using Microsoft hosted software here at Cambridge, including your emails, OneDrive, the Microsoft suite as well as the AppsAnywhere remote access virtual desktop service.

You'll need to use MFA in the following circumstances: 

• Logging in to your Microsoft Account on a new device
• Changing your password
• Adding your University email account to a new email application

MFA works by adding the need to enter a supplementary form of identification to sign in, with users able to choose from:

1. Notifications or codes send from the Microsoft Authenticator mobile and desktop app (recommended).
2. Codes sent in text messages to a mobile phone.
3. Calls to a landline or mobile phone.
4. Codes from a hardware token.

University Information Services (UIS) have provided a guide on how to set up, use, and manage MFA.

The software available through Office365 isn't necessarily for everyone and you should use whatever software you feel most comfortable with. For example, if you are on an Apple laptop, then the included software, Pages, Numbers, and Keynote (substituted for Word, Excel, and PowerPoint), can be easy to use and easy to get on with, though they save in a different format to their Microsoft counterparts.  Therefore, do bear in mind that not everyone may not have made the same software choices as you, or have the same version even if they did, so try and save in formats that are more universally accepted (such as .docx or .pdf format for written documents).  If you are interested in using LateX, then Overleaf is a good online editor that also offers a number of tutorials on compiling LateX documents; it has the added benefit of syncing your data online, so there's very little risk of losing your thesis.

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