All about moving email accounts to Exchange
What does it mean, exactly, to have your email account moved to the new Exchange-based system?
Moving email accounts is either a one-part or two-part deal, depending on how you like to think about it.
Part one is for all faculty and staff (except those in departments that are already using Exchange or will keep running their own email systems).
Part two depends on decisions made by you or your department.
The disclaimers: What I’m about to say only applies to personal, NetID email accounts for faculty and staff. Special mailboxes are their own, well, special case, and we’ll save that bit o’ fun for another time.
Part one…
… is mostly CIT’s task. The only thing you, or more likely, your department’s technical support staff, have to do is update some settings in your email application ahead of time, so it can get email from the Exchange-based system.
When your NetID comes up on CIT’s schedule, we’ll copy your email account from the old postoffice system to the new Exchange-based system. That includes all the messages you have stored on CIT’s postoffice server, meaning anything you’d be able to see in Cornell WebMail.
You’ll hear from us regarding exactly when this is happening, but if all goes to plan, you shouldn’t even notice. Your Eudora, Thunderbird, or other email application besides Cornell WebMail will work and look like it always has. And you’ll still have the same email address.
You will notice a big difference when you use a web browser to see your email, though. You’ll be using Outlook Web Access, which looks much better and lets you do more than what it’s replacing — Cornell WebMail and the uPortal.Cornell email channel.
Part two…
… is up to you or your department. That’s deciding whether to switch to a new email application. That discussion can happen at any time, and doesn’t need to be connected to when your email account is moving to Exchange.
We’re hearing that some departments will switch to new email applications when their email accounts are moved to Exchange. Others will switch sometime later. Still others will continue to let individuals use whatever application they like.
And some are only concerned about getting people off Eudora, which will finally become unsupported by CIT in May 2010, well over two years after Eudora’s own vendor stopped supporting it. (So far, Eudora still works with Exchange; we just won’t be supporting it anymore.)
What are the new email applications?
For Windows, it’s Outlook 2007, which comes with Microsoft Office 2007.
For Macintosh, there are two choices. One is Entourage 2008, which comes with Office 2008. The other is the combination of the new Apple Mail, iCal, and Address Book that will be part of the operating system Snow Leopard.
For Linux, Outlook Web Access will be the standard initially. The Linux community reports there is increasing support for Wine and Evolution as other options.
Why switch to the new email applications?
People who already use Outlook and Entourage tell us they really like the all-in-one-view of their email, calendar, address book, and tasks, and how they interact with each other and with parts of Microsoft Office.
Controlling who else can manage your email is also easier and more flexible.
We’ve also heard from technical support staff that having everyone on the same applications lets them provide better support and get more done.
What’s involved in switching?
The first task is installing and configuring the new email application. If you have Office 2007 (Windows) or Office 2008 (Mac), the installation part is probably already done.
The second task is copying the messages that are stored locally on your computer from the email application you were using before (Eudora, Thunderbird, etc.) to the new email application.
You, or your department’s technical support staff, will be able to use the mail-mover tools for Windows (Address Magic) and Macintosh (Eudora Mailbox Cleaner) to do this job. These tools move your messages, folders, attachments, and address books, and preserve what you’ve done with the messages (read, replied, forwarded, etc.).
The third task is learning the new application. More on that next time…
Gearing up for the campus migration in September
As you might have seen in Pawprint last week, we’re gearing up to start the campus migration to Exchange.
In August, we’ll be migrating a few small groups as an end-to-end test of all our tools “in the wild,” before the campus migration starts in September. Incidentally, one of those pioneer groups is mine — having my colleagues go through the migration (fellow communicators no less!) promises to be a terrifying terrific way to see things I/we should do better.
For the rest of campus, the main focus right now is getting prepared for the migration.
The technical support community is underway with the first time-sensitive task — updating a few settings in the email clients that faculty and staff are currently using, so they’ll be ready for Exchange. That means Eudora, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, whatever you’re using on your mobile phone, etc. (except Cornell WebMail).
Our understanding is that technical support staff are managing this effort in most departments, but if you’re the do-it-yourself type, here are the instructions.
Some people shouldn’t update settings: (a) people who aren’t Cornell faculty or staff and (b) people who are in the handful of departments that run their own email systems or are already on Exchange. People who forward their Cornell email somewhere else don’t need to update settings, either, unless they’re planning to stop forwarding.
The other time-sensitive task — the clock is getting deafening on this one — is building the schedule for who is migrating to Exchange when. Departments are putting in their requests over the next week or so, and we anticipate having a near-final schedule ready by mid-August.
Tomorrow, I’ll pull back the covers on what it means, exactly, to migrate to Exchange.
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