RMR Office 365 Modernization Initiative

The RMR IT department is reworking the RMR Office 365 system in late 2024 and early 2025, and this page explains changes and what they mean to RMR staff.

Why are we making changes?

RMR IT and RMR Command are aligned in using Office 365 to collaborate more effectively than ever before. Yet, the majority of RMR staff, committees, and members are not utilizing Office 365 for this purpose. We think that's because people aren't familiar with Office 365, its capabilities, or how to use it. So, RMR IT is providing documentation and instructions to increase the likelihood that people use Office 365.

The RMR IT objective has changed over the years. It used to be that only primary staffers had an RMR email account, and they were expected to use it. The policy now supports all staff members, and no longer requires the use of an RMR email account. This is accomplished through a hybrid approach where most RMR staffers will use their preferred email address, regardless of the provider: cap.gov, capnhq.gov, cowg.cap.gov, Gmail, Hotmail, or any other email provider. However, anyone an RMR email account can still obtain one.

This change requires that RMR IT consider each staffer's needs with respect to using a pre-existing email account vs. a dedicated rmr.cap.gov email account. To learn each staffer's needs, RMR conducted an IT Needs Survey in Q2 2024. Based on RMR IT's evaluation of each staffer's needs, RMR IT will be removing, modify, or creating accounts for each staffer.

What changes are being made?

First, many of you have @rmr.cap.gov email accounts. With a few exceptions*, those email accounts will be disabled. The email addresses associated with those accounts will be forwarded to the primary department leader's primary email address. For example, if your RMR email address was lg@rmr.cap.gov, but eServices lists todd@mac.com as your primary email address, messages sent to lg@rmr.cap.gov will simply be forwarded to todd@mac.com.

Second, each department will have its own team in Microsoft Teams, where they can keep 'private' files which pertain to running that team: continuity documents, inspection results, training resources, forms, mail/email templates, and other things that help the department run but which don't belong on the public-facing RMR web site. In the coming months, RMR Command will be expecting each team to start putting files in their Microsoft Teams files location.

Why Office 365/Teams, and not Google Workspace?

A lot of people are familiar with Google Workspace products (Gmail, Slides, Sheets, Meet, etc) and those people often wonder why we are using Microsoft Office 365 instead of Google Workspace. The short answer is that it was simply a command decision to use Microsoft Office 365. It is the position of RMR IT that the two tools are equally capable, accessible to RMR, and acceptable for the needs of RMR.