UNify staff email project update

As you know IT Services is currently in the process of migrating all staff email from our legacy GroupWise environment to UNify, the University's new email and calendaring system.  This involves the transfer of more than 100 million email items, and 10 Terabytes of data.

UNify is based on Microsoft's Office 365 cloud-based email service, which supports some 5 million mailboxes worldwide.

Over 800 staff from the Pilot and "Group 1" have been successfully migrated with another 4200 staff to be migrated in nine groups over the coming 12 weekends.

A lot of pre-work has been done for the migrations, but some bugs do remain in the GroupWise environment that will necessitate some manual remediation for a small number of UNify mailboxes post-migration.  IT Services has arranged additional resources for this remediation, and any problems any staff member is having should be logged in the usual way via the 17Triplezero IT Service Desk (ext17000).

Migrating to UNify also presents some calendar co-existence challenges, that affect both UNify users and GroupWise users equally, with UNify users not able to see the calendar appointments of GroupWise users and vice versa. In many cases a phone call may be the quickest way to establish availability. Alternately, there is a procedure that describes how to do a Free/Busy search using the web applications.

Wherever possible, business areas and faculties will be migrated as a group to minimise the impact of no coexistence, and obviously as each group is migrated coexistence will become less and less of an issue.  The University Executive team will be migrated as a group, (Group 4), currently targeted for Monday 30th September 2013.

Make sure to visit the UNify Website to learn more about coexistence and the other things you can do to ensure you have a successful migration.  And don't forget to check out the GETTING STARTED WITH UNIFY guide ready for DAY ONE!

There are representatives from across the University in the Business Working Party and Champions group, who are working hard with the UNify team to ensure all staff have the best possible migration experience.  IT Services appreciates their contribution.

So if you require further information don't hesitate to contact your Champion, Business Working Party representative, or the UNify team. Contact details can be found on the UNify Website.