Community Transitions to New Email

With 640 times more storage space than Outlook 2003, the PEA community is happily adjusting to the roomier, searchable email system Microsoft Office 365. Email migration for students took place March 24-25; faculty and staff migrated March 18.Kenney Chan, the school’s academic scheduler, has found the increased storage space makes it easier for him to perform his job.“As the academic scheduler, there is one day of the year where I get nearly a hundred emails in one day,” Chan said. “Many of these emails are important for me to keep in order to help me sort out problems in the current schedule. With the old email system it would be impossible to keep all these emails, but with the new one I am able to keep them all.”PEA had used the local exchange server, Outlook 2003, for the past ten years, requiring students and faculty alike to delete emails that pushed it past the 80MB capacity. The new Office 365 offers 50GB of storage space and all data is stored in the “cloud,” Director of Technology Services Diane Fandrich said.“We are currently running Office 365 in the cloud with an education license that is deeply discounted,” Fandrich said. “The benefit of this is that we no longer need to manage and maintain email servers in our server room, saving us the replacement costs of hardware, power costs and person-hours.”Now that the email is located in the cloud, it will keep itself updated on new versions of the email. ITS will not have to plan any more large migrations or upgrades for the future and will not fall behind on new features.The migration had been planned by Information Technology Services (ITS) for a few years. The original plan called for an update of the servers on campus, but with the advent of Office 365’s cloud technology, ITS felt it was prudent to wait and see if it would be a viable option to the Academy. Office 365 was released in June 2011 but was not ready for enterprise deployments until May 2012, when ITS finally felt it was appropriate to start planning the migration, Fandrich said.The migration required huge amounts of preparation before it could begin. First, ITS had to set up the infrastructure to provide communication to and from the Microsoft Exchange servers in the cloud. This infrastructure includes servers, connectivity and authentication services to ensure the security and privacy of emails.ITS also had to test the email to ensure those systems would continue to function with email in the cloud. The implementation was piloted with the IT department to ensure all the kinks were worked out before migrating to the rest of the school.With the email live last week, students and faculty members have begun to discover the differences between Office 365 and the outdated Exchange 2003.Lower Rebecca Ju appreciated the addition of an easier way to search for emails that came with the email migration.“I really like the new email,” Ju said. “It lets me search for emails, which takes so much less time than digging through my 14 page inbox. It also gives me more storage, eliminating the irritating ‘system administrator’ emails every night. It also makes it easier to keep my inbox clean by allowing an easier way to delete emails.”Senior Tyler Weitzman pointed out one of the flaws of Exeter’s old email system that has now been fixed with the migration."The new email supports HTML editing for the emails, so students can now edit emails as though they are word documents—unlike the old system which barely supported italics," Weitzman said.Although the email contained changes that many students view as positive, some students believe the email and its changes were overdue. Upper Brandon Wang said that although he feels that the new email is great, there may have been faster and better options.“The new email system is miles better than the old one.The changes reaffirm our school's commitment to technology and, while the transition may be difficult, the new system is worth it,” Wang said. “That being said, this change is long overdue and there are other options that might have been easier. Google Apps for Education, which would have been free for us, comes to mind.”Fandrich, on the other hand, explained that the migration actually happened earlier than expected. “I understand that some students may think it took us too long to migrate. However, we announced that the migration would take place this academic year and would be completed by the end of the academic year,” she said. “So in reality, we completed the migration ahead of schedule.”Even if ITS did not migrate to the new email as quickly as some students hoped for, Weitzman felt that the wait for the email was worth it.“I think IT definitely took their time to migrate IT personnel first to make sure it works for them before sending it out to the students,” Weitzman said. “So I think they did do a good job testing it before releasing. I guess some people are frustrated that it didn’t happen earlier because they were graduating, but the rest of the students are going to have it for years so I think the timing was fine.”Many Exonians, however, are still not used to the new email and do not know how to use many of its benefits or overcome its disadvantages. History instructor Erik Wade said that he believes it will take some time before all Exonians get used to it, but is confident that they will.“It’s only been a week,” Wade said. “I think we need to give it like a month or maybe over the summertime, and once we get back it will be normal. I believe that when you have an email of any kind, you will be able to figure it out.”