Improvements to University email services

17 Nov 2009

Student 'early adopters' transfer to Microsoft Outlook Live

IT Services are now in the process of implementing the very latest Microsoft technologies for the provision of email and calendar services across the university.

On 13 November, approximately 1200 "Early Adopter" students from the School of Mathematics transferred to Microsoft’s Outlook Live Service. This is a service hosted within Microsoft’s hi-tech data centre facility in Dublin.

The transfer of the students onto the service went as planned. These students are now enjoying the benefits of Outlook Live, which includes some great new features and enhancements, such as:

• A modern, feature rich web user interface
• A huge increase in storage space
• Integrated calendar and instant messaging
• Mobile device compatibility (students can have their email pushed to their phone)

In the coming weeks, all undergraduates will be switched over to the service.

Simultaneously, a project is well under way for the introduction of a new email service for staff. This will be based on the very latest version of the market leading Microsoft product, Exchange 2010.

In conjunction with Microsoft, we have produced a detailed design for the new service. At present we are close to selecting a hardware supplier and expect to place an order in early December for the infrastructure that will support the service. We expect the new system to be available for the first users towards the end of the first quarter of 2010.

The staff email system will provide very similar user functionality and benefits to those enjoyed by students, but it will be located within the University’s own data centre facilities. This will enable us to integrate the system with other services used by staff and allow the University to meet increasingly specific legal requirements on the handling of information.