Office 365 roll out completes amidst technical hitches
Thomas Lim on the email move that's been causing a few headaches, but bigger and better mailboxes are now in the hands of the masses.
A scheme which will move all undergraduate email accounts from the College’s data centre to Microsoft Office 365 will conclude today. On completion, every Undergraduate’s mailbox will be hosted in a Microsoft data centre, as part of their Office 365 product. The move promises a range of benefits, including a mailbox fifty times larger than what is currently offered, as well near unlimited file storage and much improved collaboration of Office documents.
Whilst the end goal should prove to be an improved experience, many users have complained of various issues during the migration process, including issues syncing phones and with passwords, as well as emails bouncing due to the move of mailbox. One student commented on the move “Initially Outlook was broken on the College machines, and now I have to access my emails from a different website”, with another adding “It may be inconvenient now, but we are getting a significant amount of extra space”. Most do accept that they do not like change, with comments like “I guess we just don’t like change, but we will adapt and grow accustomed to the new way of accessing emails.”
John Shemilt, Imperial’s Director of ICT (who set up Microsoft Exchange for the College in 1997), had the following to say on the move: “I think there is a lot of publicity about the advantages, unlimited file storage, vastly increased mailbox size. We know there are some limitations as well as advantages, but what we need to understand, is where you and your colleagues have issues. Whether it is provided in house or on the cloud there will be issues but unless we know what they are we cannot try to resolve them.
So if you do come across issues do let us know via the ICT Service Desk [service.desk@imperial.ac.uk], and we will do all we can to resolve them with you... we need to have the best service possible.
This is a partnership to make sure the students get the best value service we can all achieve.”
The move does not stop with undergraduates; the plan is to move all college mailboxes to Microsoft Office 365, effectively removing College equipment or servers from running Microsoft Exchange.
