The University of Toledo is working to migrate all faculty and staff to Microsoft Office 365, a cloud-based service.
Work is underway on Health Science Campus and is scheduled to be completed by the end of February, with Main Campus and the rest of the University migration set to begin during the first week of March. Students were migrated to Office 365 in 2015.
“The reason we’re moving all UT mailbox users to Office 365 is that it offers much more storage space for users, increasing mailbox size up to 100 gigabytes and business storage capacity to one terabyte,” stated Bill McCreary, vice president and chief information officer/chief technology officer. “Additionally, the University will avoid the ongoing costs of hardware updates and issues, as we reduce the number of servers running this environment.”
“In practical terms, this means you will no longer get into ‘email jail,’ where you’re frozen out of email because you have too many messages in your mailbox,” noted Dominic D’Emilio, senior director of network services and technology support.
“Since it’s cloud-based, Office 365 also will better support strategic priorities, such as research collaboration, because large documents can readily be shared,” D’Emilio added. “And it will improve our security and electronic forensics discovery infrastructure.”
Information technology is sending all users an email notification approximately one week prior to migration work being completed in their department. For helpful information, frequently asked questions, and a complete list of departments and their tentative migration dates, visit utoledo.edu/it/office365.
“Once migration to Office 365 occurs, users should not see any difference when using their mailbox, calendar or other applications, such as Word or Excel,” advised Jason Rahe, senior collaboration systems administrator. “Everything will pretty much look and operate the same.
“Once migration is completed, though, the user will receive a pop-up message from Outlook that states, ‘Your administrator has made a change that requires you to restart Outlook.’ When that occurs, users need to restart Outlook,” Rahe said. “Also, Skype for Business and Lync users will need to exit those applications before restarting Outlook.”
“Before a migration date is scheduled for a particular department, users should contact IT at office365migrationquestions@utoledo.edu if they have a shared departmental mailbox, routinely share their mailbox or calendar with other users, or if they have voice-mail accounts they use for special groups or for their own department,” said Dianne DeVault, associate account administrator. “This will enable us to better coordinate our schedule so this work can be completed at the same time as the migration.”
Once users are migrated to Office 365, they may need to resync their mobile devices to their Office 365 email account. Step-by-step instructions are available on the Office 365 site.
More information about UT’s migration to Office 365 is available here. If you still have questions after reviewing this information, contact the IT Help Desk at 419.530.2400 or send questions to office365migrationquestions@utoledo.edu.
