Overview

Since email and calendar services were offered to OneSchool North America staff and students, the underlying servers were hosted in our data center.   OSG-NA is now moving our Email (Exchange) service (calendar and email) from our managed data center infrastructure to Microsoft’s Office 365 Education cloud service.  OSG-NA will continue to be the service owner/provider for this service, but the underlying Exchange infrastructure and applications will be hosted by Microsoft in their data centers located in the United States.


Why are we migrating to Office 365?

OSG-NA has completed a pilot evaluation and testing of Office 365 Exchange, and has performed a thorough risk assessment, and has determined it will meet the campus needs as an alternative to locally hosted Exchange.  OSG-NA negotiated a system-wide contract with Microsoft for Office 365 services. This makes it possible for us to offer and support, in cooperation with Microsoft, a more robust, stable, accessible, and consistent email and calendar service.  Some benefits include:

  • increased stability and reliability
  • increased redundancy and disaster recovery
  • lower administrative costs


What advantages are there for you?

Office 365 includes several features for faculty and staff. To begin with, our contract includes more storage for email than we could supply locally. Other services, such as Office Web Apps (document creation online), OneDrive (document storage and collaboration), and Teams are just part of the Office 365 suite. Key features include:

  • lower cost – OSG-NA can provide O365 to faculty and staff
  • more email capacity: 100Gb compared to the 4-8Gb we used to provide
  • large capacity in OneDrive (1Tb)
  • better mobile support
  • lower costs for related Microsoft licenses


Who Will Be Migrated

Each campus user (staff and student) will be notified when their mailbox and calendar will be scheduled for migration.  Please take a moment and review the information below that will help to explain the process and give guidance before and after the migration process.  All staff and students will eventually be migrated to the cloud.


Before Migration

Some features of your email and calendar environment will not migrate. Calendar permissions, shared calendars, and automatic forwarding orders will need to be recreated after migration. Taking note of any such customizations will make it easier for you to recreate them.


During Migration

During migration you can still use Exchange as your normally would.  The amount of time it will take to complete the migration will vary based on the size of your mailbox.  If we run into any issues regarding the transition, we will reach out to you.  Since this transition happens in the background, you really won't even know it's happening.


After Migration

You will notice a few things after the migration completes, please take a moment and review them here:

  • You’ll need to give Outlook the opportunity to discover that your account is now in the cloud.  You may just be asked to re-authenticate yourself.  Please use your email address as your username, since your original configuration might have utilized sterling-school\username as your login username. If  this does not happen automatically (you start Outlook and don’t see any new mail), go to File/Account Settings, select your Exchange account and click the “Repair” button.  
  • When you were notified about the migration via email, that message advised you about the features of your Exchange account that you may have to re-create after migration:
    • filters
    • rules
    • forwarding
    • delegate rights
  • Shared calendars will not transition over with the migration. You may need to go through the process of sharing your calendar with your collaborators again, or requesting them to share with you.
  • It's expected that your mobile devices will need to be setup for email again after migration. It will be easier for you to just remove your account on your device and add it again.  Please follow instructions on your phone to add an Office 365 or Exchange account.  When asked for your username, please make sure to use your full email address.
  • For those that use Outlook Web Access (OWA), there is a new link: http://outlook.office365.com/