How we are dealing with your IT email service issues

07 Nov 2019

We in IT Services are aware that staff are experiencing frustration with our response to email requests at the moment.

This is because we have accumulated a large backlog of service and support requests for the email service as a result of long-term absences that have significantly reduced the team’s capacity during the past six months. We are working hard to reduce the queue size, while also supporting a number of initiatives within IT Services such as the implementation of Microsoft Office 365 to improve the way we work on a daily basis.

In tackling the queue, we will prioritise any requests where colleagues have no access to email, so that we can restore ability to send and receive email. After this, we will work through the queue in priority order, so that the most pressing issues get resolved as quickly as possible.

We are aware of a large number of service requests for staff who want to be transferred to our existing onsite Microsoft Exchange (email and calendar) service so that they get full access to shared mailboxes and calendars. This is likely because they were previously students, and therefore have their email stored on the existing student Office 365 service. The process to transfer colleagues is laborious and also prone to errors, and given the imminent plans to start upgrading all our colleagues to Office 365, we have changed our approach to these requests.

We are now working with a partner company to address the issues between our onsite Microsoft Exchange service and Office 365. Once these issues are addressed, any colleagues currently on the student Office 365 service should be able to work with shared calendars hosted on our onsite Microsoft Exchange service, without the need to be transferred. We hope to have these issues resolved within the next two weeks.

We apologise to our colleagues for any frustrations that they might be experiencing with the support of the email service, and can assure you that we are working hard to reduce the backlog of issues and requests as soon as possible.

If you would like to discuss this further, please contact Mike Smith, IT Services Hosting and Cloud Manager.