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Project Progress

(last updated Friday 17 May 2013)

The Staff Email project has successfully negotiated a major hurdle over the last month. With the help of our commercial partners, a solution has been found to a  major technical issue affecting Microsoft customers worldwide.

This issue prevented testing of the migration process from GroupWise to the new version of Office 365. As a consequence, the new key dates are: 

3 – 21 June 2013 – Pilot group migration
21 June 2013 – Pilot assessment – GO / NO GO
24 June 2013 – 30 September 2013 – (Pending successful pilot) full rollout of all staff migrations)

Whole Units and Schools will be migrated together, along with positional mailboxes and GroupWise resources associated with the Unit / School.  Staff will be contacted three weeks before they are scheduled to be moved to the new service to alert them to the start of migration activity for their Unit / School.   
At this time, training resources, planning templates and instructions will be made available.

The project’s “Business Working Party” is continuing to gather recommendations for “Champions” in each Unit and School.  Champions will be classroom trained in the new email service, while online training will be available to everyone.

All staff will be asked to undertake some planning in preparation for the move as not all GroupWise functions can be migrated to the new service. 
Key functions that will NOT be migrated include “Proxy” settings, text templates and local mailbox rules.  These will need to be recreated in the new service. 

A new “Corporate Email Signature” template will be introduced at the same time as the new service. 

What’s Next

Q2 in 2013 will see one key activity:

  • Conduct the pilot and finalise the migration process,

Q3 in 2013 will see two key activities:

  • Commence the wider migration across the University
  • Commence the archiving of non-migrated (inactive) mailbox data.

Q4 in 2013 will see four key activities:

  • Complete the wider migration of mailboxes from GroupWise to Office 365 for Education
  • Complete the archiving of non-migrated (inactive) mailbox data
  • Decommission legacy systems (e.g. GroupWise)
  • Close project.