Yesterday, the Department of Planning and Information Resources held a very well attended forum where they discussed the switchover from RoyalMail to the new Microsoft Live@edu software to manage our university’s email. Some of the key points brought up were:
- Your access information will likely change to a permanent, unique identifier (likely your R-number). Your e-mail address will not change.
- Migration of users to the new system will begin in the Summer of 2011, starting with the staff.
- Faculty email conversions are slated to begin (on a department-by-department basis) the 3rd week of the fall semester.
- Early adopters are welcome! Starting in the Summer, any faculty who wishes to convert their email early will have the option to do so. When we find the procedure for this, we will let you know asap.
- There is a hard limit of 10GB on the new email system. Requests for a more storage cannot be honored for any reason. This is due to the limits of the software implementation and is dictated by Microsoft.
- Mail stored in your webmail will be moved to Live@edu without any effort on your part.
- Mail stored on your local computer can be moved to the new system. There are a number of software packages IR is looking into that can facilitate this, but it will require some intervention by the user.
- Since there is a 10GB limit, you should make sure you have less than 10GB of mail stored on your local drive. Vince Yanusauskas put together a short handout to check the amount of email stored on your local computer. You can find that here. If you are storing less than 9GB, you have nothing to worry about!
- If you are storing files via Thunderbird or Outlook on your local hard drive, please post below how much you’re using. We’re interested in knowing how many faculty might run into this 10GB limit.
You can download the full presentations here.
