Up to 2017 the email exchange server in use for St Mary’s staff email accounts was a Microsoft 2010 version located on-premise. With the platform reaching end of life two options were identified to replace it.
A move to Office 365 was selected in preference to the build of a new, on-premise 2016 version.
St Mary’s student email accounts were already on Office 365 so migration of student accounts were not in the project scope.
Hence, this project's objective was to roll out Microsoft Office 365 to all St Mary's staff including One Drive for personal drives.
After an initial migration for a pilot set of users, a phased migration of user email accounts, and personal drives was conducted according to an agreed department by department schedule of Service Support Teams initially followed by the Academic Schools from January through to July 2018.
Migrations were carried out department by department from February to August 2018 and were performed overnight to minimise disruption (since during the mailbox migration users were not be able to send or receive emails for up to one hour).
All St Mary’s staff email accounts were migrated to Office 365 and all St Mary’s personal drives were migrated to One Drive.
The creation of Office 365 accounts for new staff has been automated.
The historic on-premise exchange was decommissioned (December 18).