University of Louisville employees will have their email accounts migrate from Microsoft Exchange Outlook to Microsoft’s Office365 Outlook within the next few months and into the fall semester.
The first phase of the go365 rollout is currently underway. Employees will be notified in advance of their scheduled migration date and migrations will be done through the evening hours to reduce impact on day-to-day university operations.
Most who also have ownership of a campus service account will have those migrated simultaneously with their individual accounts. Those individuals with large accounts will be migrated over the weekend.
In addition to email migration, some calendar and scheduling modifications will be necessary.
Lee Smith, interim COO, said users should not notice any major changes with their email functionality; test groups have been working to solve any issues before the full rollout. Smith and his team have also already migrated successfully.
The biggest driver of the change is to increase storage. Currently, email systems are hosted on internal UofL servers. With Outlook365, everything will move into Microsoft’s dedicated cloud-based servers. This will remove storage limitations and employees can send larger attachments and have access to unlimited archives.
Office365 also offers a better disaster recovery plan – if UofL experiences an outage, information will be accessible remotely. Smith also notes that the new system is very secure.
“We still own all of our data even though it will be in the cloud,” he said.
Students have been using Office365 since Fall 2010, so they will only see slight changes with the migration. For employees, some technical adaptation will be necessary. For example, employees will have to change their login and update email settings on the laptops, desktops and mobile devices.
Tier 1 employees have been trained to assist everyone through the transition, and customer service and technical support will be available before and after individuals’ migration dates.
IT has a dedicated website and will add more information as it becomes available: louisville.edu/go365.
