Below is a summary of key announcements about the migration to the Office 365 cloud service and any related developments.
Decision to upgrade to Microsoft Office 365
The University was due to upgrade to Exchange 2013. Since Exchange is one of the services included in Office 365, UITS decided to explore upgrading to the cloud service offering since it would provide the University with enhanced capabilities and was also included in our current agreement with Microsoft. After a research and planning process that involved our IT governance body as well as the broader IT community and favorable feedback, we finalized the decision and announced the upcoming upgrade to the University.
Migration
UITS will migrate university email and calendar services from our local Exchange environment to Microsoft Office 365 starting at 5:00 p.m. on April 10th and concluding by 7:30 on April 13th. Our communication to faculty and staff whose accounts will be impacted has focused on login changes and re-configuration of mail clients and devices after the migration. We will transition to communicating about our support strategies closer to April 10th and after the migration, the services and capabilities available.
Office 2013 and Office for Mac: 2011
When UITS migrated to Office 365 early, we discovered that mail account transition process was smoother with up-to-date versions of Microsoft Office and that all the features of Office 365 were accessible. Based on this experience, we recommended that individuals upgrade to Office 2013 prior to the migration, and UITS User Support Services is in the process of coordinating the upgrade. For Mac customers, we recommend running the most current operating system (10.9 or 10.10) and upgrading to Office for Mac: 2011.
Lync
The School of Engineering (SoE) hosted a local Microsoft Lync service that integrated with the UConn email and calendar system. Lync is included in and integrates smoothly with Office 365, and SoE and UITS were planning the move Lync to Office 365. The recent security incident in SoE compromised the university’s local Lync service and prompted its early move to Office 365.
Town Hall meetings
To provide our IT community with detailed information about the upcoming migration and answer any questions, UITS scheduled two town hall meetings. They occurred on March 25th, and April 1st in the Dodd Konover Auditorium and a recorded version is available.
Forwarding
UITS, the Office of the General Counsel, and the Office of Audit, Compliance, and Ethics revised the university electronic communication policy (email) to address an inability for the University to meet its legal obligations for e-discovery and litigation holds on accounts that exist outside of official university services. The revised policy stipulates that only forwarding to official university mail services will be permitted. Unofficial providers, such as Google, Yahoo, and AOL, are no longer eligible. This policy went into effect on March 13th, and UITS will implement the change on April 10th during the university-wide migration to Office 365.