The Division of Technology & Innovation (T&I) is working on a project to migrate our existing campus-based Exchange email infrastructure to Exchange Online, in Microsoft's Azure cloud.

This migration is a lynchpin in CI's ongoing disaster recovery and business continuity planning efforts, as it will help ensure availability of CI's administrative email system for faculty & staff in the event of damage to our campus data center. Exchange Online also provides greater redundancy and makes email growth easier to manage and afford.

For most users, the migration to Exchange Online will be seamless and transparent. Most users will be able to continue to use with current Microsoft Outlook desktop client (some users of older version of Outlook, Windows or Mac operating systems may be required to upgrade.) Access to campus webmail via myCI will continue to function as normal, and migrated users will be directed to a familiar and updated Microsoft webmail interface. For those of you that use Microsoft Hotmail, the new Outlook Web Access user interface will look very familiar. Visit the Microsoft Outlook Web App support site for more information about the new user interface.

Tonight (6/9/2017), T&I will complete its first migration of a pilot group of 10 pre-selected users to the new Exchange and Azure infrastructure. These pilot users will help debug the initial migration, and provide valuable feedback for planning of the next migration waves. Next, a second group of 10 pilot users will be selected from the campus community for migration to the new infrastructure. If you wish to participate in the second pilot group, please contact Asha Ramachandra at asha.ramachandra@csuci.edu to discuss the details.

Once testing is completed, during the next phase of the project, faculty & staff accounts will be migrated in groups to Exchange Online. We look forward to providing additional information to the campus community in the next few weeks about the timing and groupings. Based on the current project schedule, T&I expects to complete the Exchange migration before the start of fall 2017 classes.

Please contact Asha Ramachandra at asha.ramachandra@csuci.edu with any further questions about this project, and thank you for your patience while we complete this important migration.

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