Office 365 accelerated approach
28 Apr 2020
Aiming to transfer all staff and postgraduate research students to Office 365 by the end of May
The IT Services Modernising IT programme set out to gradually introduce Office 365. However, since the suspension of face to face teaching and closure of non-essential buildings, the University's Senior Leadership Team (SLT) has approved an acceleration of the roll out.
This acceleration means that we’ve had to change our approach, and we have taken advice from Microsoft on the best way to do this.
We are working with our strategic delivery partner, HCL Technologies, to first transfer everyone to Exchange Online – providing colleagues with cloud based email, calendar and storage (OneDrive) – as a prerequisite to the later roll out of Teams, which will enable improved remote working, collaboration and communication.
We aim to get everyone transferred to Exchange Online by the end of May. We then expect the roll out of Teams will start in June.
How will I know when I’m being transferred?
You will receive an email from our End User Computing (EUC) team about a week before you are scheduled to transfer. You will then get a reminder email on the day of your transfer. Where we need more information about your computer or setup, the EUC team will contact you.
What’s happened so far?
In total there are around 25,000 email accounts (including shared mailboxes) to transfer to Office 365 – it’s no small task! So far we have transferred just over 2,500 in what we’ve called Wave 1 of the roll out. This includes a selection of those who signed up to be Early Adopters, some of which have access to Teams.
Wave 2 of the roll out is broken down into two batches:
- Batch 1 started on 27 April and runs until 6 May – there's just under 1,000 mailboxes involved. Most of these are for colleagues without any complex application dependencies or shared mailbox access. They're from a cross-section from all three Faculties and a mixture of Directorates. It includes our University's Senior Leadership Team.
- Batch 2 starts on 10 May and runs until the end of the month. There will be ten scheduled transfers of around 1,500 mailboxes each. Where possible, we will group by functional area, but this is dependent on complexities around dependencies.
Why does Teams come later?
The initial focus on Exchange Online means that we can continue progressing the pre-requisite work to make the eventual roll out of Teams a success. To succeed, the approach needs effective change management with a defined structure, great communications, guidance and training material, as well as a robust support structure. For this, we are working with a company called Hable – a Microsoft global training partner specialising in Office 365 adoption and change management.
What else is new?
Over the last few weeks we have been working on a number of other tasks which will make the transition much more of a success. These include:
- Outlook app – this is now available for those who have transferred to Office 365. You can download it from the app store on your mobile device for the full mobile experience!
- IMAP – colleagues who currently use IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol) will be able to use Evolution, a modern authentication email client which does not require the legacy protocol and therefore will be much more secure and longer lasting.
- Teams authorisation tool – an automated tool to support the creation and authorisation of teams in Microsoft Teams.
More information
You can read more about Office 365 on the Modernising IT website.
Our guides and resources page details instructions on what you will need to do after your transfer to get setup and working – such as how to re-add your University email account onto your phone. We’ll remind you of this in the emails we’ll send you, but you might want to bookmark it for later.
If you have any questions about the accelerated rollout please email the project team at euc@manchester.ac.uk