Office Mix Migration
What is Happening?
Microsoft has notified its customers that Office Mix will be retired on May 1, 2018. On this date the Office Mix site and all its content will be officially discontinued. The site will no longer be accessible after that date. Any links to your Office Mix content in your courses will stop working after this date.
What do I need to do?
A number of staff at UQ have been using Office Mix as a tool to create interactive multi-media presentations within their Blackboard course sites. If you have been using Office Mix, you will need to download any files you wish to keep before May 1, 2018.
If you would like to save your content, you can download your mixes as PowerPoint files (.pptx), and your analytics data as Excel files (.xlsx) to save to your local storage device.
We recommend that you publish your Mixes as videos and upload them to UQ's video server, Kaltura. If you have quiz questions in your Mixes you will need to recreate them using the Kaltura quiz tool. The results from the Kaltura quiz tool transfer automatically to Grade Centre. Refer to the Office Mix Migration Procedure for step by step instructions.
Will Microsoft replace Office Mix?
Microsoft have said that "Over time, we will be adding the best experiences of Office Mix across PowerPoint, Stream, and Forms to make it even easier for you to create and share interactive online videos."
Microsoft has also published an information page. UQ staff should note that we do not currently have access to Microsoft Stream.
Staff Communications
The retirement of Office Mix will be communicated to staff via a variety of communication channels.
- Notice in Learn.UQ spotlight on the Welcome page - 22 January 2018.
- Email to all attendees of the Desktop Recording - Office Mix, Staff Development workshop - 22 January 2018.
- An automatic message about the retirement of Office Mix as been set up in Learn.UQ. This message will be display every time a staff member or student clicks on an Office Mix link in their course.
- eLearning Newsletter:
- Email to relvant course coordinators and educational designers - 6 April
Desktop Recording alternative
eLearning Systems and Support recommend staff use Kaltura Capture Space as a desktop recording replacement. Please refer to the Desktop Recording guide for further information.
FAQs
Can the current Mixes in my course continue to be use until 1 May 2018?
Yes, but we recommend that you ensure that you have downloaded a copy of all your presentations. The ability to add new Office Mix links to your Learn.UQ course has been disabled. Links that have been copied forward from a previous semester will still work.
An automatic message about the retirement of Office Mix, will be display every time a staff member or student clicks on an Office Mix link in their course.
Can I still publish Mixes to the Office website until 1 May 2018?
No, the publishing functionality has not been available since 1 January 2018.
Can I continue to use Office Mix to produce videos?
Yes, only the Office Mix publishing site is not available. Office Mix PowerPoint plug in though may not work with future versions of PowerPoint or Windows. Note, the Office Mix PowerPoint plug in is no longer available to download.
Do UQ staff have access to Microsoft Stream?
No. ITS has indicated that there is no plan at this time for UQ staff to be provisioned with Stream.
Could I migrate my Office Mixes to a private Stream account?
Yes, but this does not have any advantages over uploading the content to Kaltura. Your Office Mix will be converted to a video and the navigation and quizzes features will not be available.