Starting Friday, July 29, Information Resources and Technologies will begin upgrading the university's Microsoft Exchange email environment to the latest version (2010). The upgrade requires the migration of approximately 35,000 St. Thomas email accounts. The process to migrate all accounts will take up to 15 days, but the impact will be minimal for most users.
What will happen?
Between July 29 and Monday, Aug. 15, all mailboxes will be moved from the old 2007 Exchange environment to the new 2010 Exchange environment. Because of the number involved we cannot predict when the move of a specific account will be complete.
How will this affect me?
- Email, calendars, and tasks will continue to work seamlessly throughout the process.
- This will not require a password change.
- You may receive a notification in Outlook that the administrator has made changes to the server. Close and reopen Outlook to restore the connection.
- Public folders will be accessible throughout the process.
- Secondary email boxes will be accessible in Outlook throughout the process. They will not be accessible in OWA until the migration process is complete.
- If you are a Mac user who is still using Office 2008, Entourage will no longer work. Please use Outlook Web Access (OWA) https://mail.stthomas.edu. Contact the Tech Desk at ( 651) 962-6230 or irthelp@stthomas.edu, or stop by Tech Desk Too, in St. Paul or Scholars, in Minneapolis, with your UST issued laptop for installation of Office 2011.
- If you use a third party email client (e.g. Thunderbird), please check the product documentation and ensure the client is compatible with Microsoft Exchange 2010.
- Active Sync for mobile devices will transfer seamlessly if configured according to IRT directions. Visit https://www.stthomas.edu/irt to view directions. If you have different configurations, reset the connections using our directions.
- Both the look and the functionality of Outlook Web Access are more similar to Microsoft Outlook.
- The functionality in OWA will now be virtually the same in Safari 3.1 and later, Firefox 3.0.1 and later, and IE 7.0 and later.
For real time updates throughout the transition visit the IRT Alerts page.
NOTE: At no time throughout this process will IRT ask for your username and password via email, nor will it ask you to visit a Web page and log in with your username and password. If you receive an email with this type of a request, it is a phishing attempt.
