Duke students to transition to email in the cloud

Students will transition to a new email system beginning this winter as part of Duke's move to Microsoft Office 365, a cloud-based service that will better meet the needs of university and health system users.

The transition, which began this fall with Duke's Office of Information Technology (OIT), will be conducted in waves and will include faculty and staff in the university and health system. Users will be notified via email in advance of their migration. Full email services will be offered to Duke alumni for the first time.

OIT is working with department and school IT leaders to develop the transition timelines.

"We want to make the migrations as smooth as possible. Based on feedback from students, for example, we're planning to migrate current undergraduates as a group, so they can help support each other," said Charley Kneifel, OIT's senior technical director.

The new system will provide the following benefits for Duke users:

• Increased mailbox size (from 2GB to 50GB for university Exchange users).
• Unified email and calendaring across the university and health system.
• Improved web interface.

The transition will facilitate effective collaboration across the university and health system, said Billy Willis, chief technology officer for Duke Medicine.

"We are looking forward to deploying Office 365 for health system IT staff who support the hospital system," Willis said.

Users will still access the system using their preferred email client, although some configuration changes will be necessary. No email policies will change.

Duke is among a growing number of universities to move to cloud-based email and will become one of the first comprehensive deployments of Office 365 across both the university and health system.

The university currently operates two on-site mail systems: DukeMail, powered by Oracle, and Microsoft Exchange. The health system also operates its own Microsoft Exchange system. The current DukeMail system, which has more than 40,000 mailboxes, is running on hardware that is more than four years old. Office 365 will replace those on-site systems with a single unified cloud-based environment.

Office 365 will be accessible through a web browser or using recent Microsoft Outlook clients. University users also can connect using popular email clients that support IMAP (Internet Messaging Access Protocol), such as Apple mail, Thunderbird and most smartphone mail applications; they should check with local IT support staff for recommendations or restrictions on specific devices and clients.

Users will be notified several weeks in advance of their scheduled move. Additional information is available on the OIT website.