University email is due to change to a different system before the spring semester is over. In conjunction with SGA (Student Government Association), the University’s Information Management and IT department have been working on a cloudbased enterprise email for over a year now.
The new system, managed and sponsored by Microsoft, is for educational institutions and will be implemented at the University at no direct cost. The selection of this system was backed by elements of familiarity due to similar software with compatibility and support being very simple to navigate.
As of now, 216 students in primary pilot groups have been using the system with hardly any problems. With events such as registration imminently approaching, ‘Hawkmail@Live,’ will go live for all remaining student accounts before the spring semester ends.
“We have to migrate in batches,” said Edward Christensen, VP for Information Management. “The motivation is that if we didn’t do it for the spring, we might as well wait. To move students while they’re off for summer, makes no sense.”
Benefits of the new mail system include a 10GB inbox, 25GB of cloud storage, and web apps for Word, Excel and PowerPoint.
In the first stage of migration, for the first six to eight weeks of spring, 22 students from the Student Help Desk and SGA began using the pilot. They were migrated in February. The second wave of student volunteers that migrated to the pilot, did so over spring break and the rest of the University will migrate before the semester ends for a complete transfer to the new system.
All existing email within the student accounts will be moved to the newer system; however contacts and calendar will not.
According to Christensen, in addition to student use of the system while at the University, this email will continue to be available to future alumni as long as Microsoft offers the program.
Daniel Franciscus, Systems Administrator for Server Operations was the projects main technical lead says that this will be a good upgrade from SquirrelMail. He also mentioned the pros and cons with mobile devices.
“It’s most beneficial feature is the 25GB sky drive. There’s free storage on the Microsoft Server, anywhere with the web browser, and on mobile devices such as iPhone, Andriod, you can sync contacts and calendar reminders,” he said, “Blackberries are more complicated than iPhones.”
Franciscus’ main objective was to makes sure that the migration was as easy as possible. He wanted mainly three things, “Make it simple, when you log in, you migrate for the first time with no issues, and we will become adjusted to it.”
The email system has not changed for a long time and this has been something that the University has been looking at doing for about a year now. “The idea was floated several years ago and there are a bunch of technical reasons why these weren’t seen in a good light; that being legal reasons, and technologies being new,” said Christensen.
One of the best things about the transfer is the ability for students to have unlimited help from employees that already know how to use the system. Being that students have had few problems thus far, the transfer is on its way.
Christensen and Franciscus are ready for the change to happen, alongside SGA. They were searching for something better, something that would solve the space problem. With implementation of this new system, those ideas are now a reality. There are lots of ways people are accessing it now also, with every computer and every operating system.
If a student, or faculty member finds themselves lost in transferring over to the new system, there will be a help page located on the Campus Technology section of the University’s site, guiding them through the new Hawkmail@Live.
“We’re all really excited for it to roll out. This is really something that will increase productivity. Getting used to it you will see, it’s a much better system,” said Franciscus.
IMAGE COURTESY of Joanna Zietara
