Email System
Email System Upgrade Path
Like it or not, email remains a staple of our communications. Campus email evolved from UNIX-based terminal accounts back in the early 1990s through several iterations of Microsoft's email platform Exchange. Our Exchange 2007 platform was the longest-lived system due to many integrations and customizations over the years which made upgrading it a substantial project further obstructed by a continuous stream of higher priority projects and IT resource constraints. Storage space for email became a continuous problem as the attractiveness of cloud-based email became the industry norm.
Solutions from Google (Gmail) and Microsoft (Office365) were both considered.
In 20xx, the campus ran a pilot of both Gmail and Office365 for students. The results of the pilot weighed heavily in favor of Office365 so in 2015 the students were migrated to Microsoft's cloud email of Office365 with plans to move Faculty and Staff afterward. Then other big, time-sensitive projects got in the way.
Time for Change
One of the repercussions of the Banner project is that it necessitated a change to our electronic identity architecture (read more about that here). An important thing to note is that an individual's email address is inherently associated with their electronic ID in a system. So the Banner project impacted electronic IDs which then impacted email. Associating the new IDs to an old email system just didn't make sense. We needed to do it before the ID project.
Managing Risk
Due to the number of customizations to the faculty/staff side of our email environment and the size of the mailboxes, migrating from Exchange 2007 to Office 365 proved to be a very high-risk process that could have resulted in lost emails, corrupted accounts and inconsistent results. The migration tools were not as mature as they are in newer versions of Exchange. Therefore an intermediary upgrade to a newer version was necessary before we could hope to make the jump to Office 365. After much planning and preparation throughout 2019, the migration to new Exchange servers occurred in early November of that year.
The Next Steps
As we continue our work with our institutional peers in Fort Collins of exploring how we can share enterprise IT systems across the System, the subject has come up about sharing the same email platform since they are also users of Office365. This would be done in such away to preserve our current respective email addresses, but share the same Microsoft-licensed cloud platform. This could be potentially cost-effective, but also leverage support and training resources across our institutions.
Discussions are underway between our campuses and Microsoft licensing partners and consultants to find the best way forward in approaching a common email platform that will leverage all the current features of a modern integrated communications and collaboration system.
It is our hope and intention to have a finalized plan drafted by the fourth quarter of 2020. It will be vital to implement the new electronic IDs first as well as achieve other milestones of the Banner project.
