Staff emails and calendars are set to migrate to Office 365 this March, with the move scheduled from 8:00 pm on Friday 9 March. The migration will continue over Saturday 10 and Sunday 11 March.

The migration will be monitored over the weekend. Additional IT Service Desk support will be available from 8:00 am Monday 12 March.

IT had originally planned to carry out the move in phases, but now will move all email over the weekend to ensure a smoother transition.

What is changing?

Emails and calendars will now be stored in Office 365, on Microsoft servers instead of University managed servers. All mailboxes will automatically be increased to 50GB. Office 365 allows for integration between your email and other Office 365 products and services like OneDrive for Business.

You can continue to use Outlook on Windows and macOS and this will prompt you to restart the application when your email is moved. For mobile phones and tablets, IT recommend the Outlook app though the web version of Outlook is much improved over the current Outlook Web Access and works well on mobile devices. Other mail clients, e.g. those using IMAP, will also work with Office 365.

IT have migrated over 3,000 test mailboxes successfully and are confident the mailboxes of current users can be successfully migrated over the weekend timescale. As a failsafe measure, IT will be running local mail servers in parallel with the Office 365 service for a period. If any mailbox fails to migrate, it will still be available from the local servers.

What’s next?

Colleagues will shortly receive an email from IT providing more information on the migration. Another email will follow a few days before the first day of the migration (Friday 9 March), which will include helpful links and advice.

If you have any queries in the meantime, please contact IT for more information.

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