Colleagues,
I am happy to announce that this weekend with the approval of the senior cabinet, we will be migrating our email services to a more robust and flexible environment in-house. ITT has recently procured and installed the necessary hardware and software to host our email services in-house allowing us to take advantage of all of the features of the latest exchange email services product which includes reduced deployment costs, simplified high availability and disaster recovery, greater mobility and flexible access, safeguards for sensitive information and reduced risk of malware and spam.
What these features translate to for you and allow us to do is first and foremost provide you with the email space you need to accommodate your current needs plus some growth. Currently our outsourcing environment allocates 2gb (gigabytes) of email space per email box per person and we have reached our limit on the amount of space our budgeted dollars will buy. By default, in our in-house environment, each email box will be allotted double the space plus some allocated in our current environment (from 2gb to 5gb). We have also reached the limit on the number of email accounts our budgeted dollars could buy meaning that we cannot accommodate new accounts. And finally, our outsourcing environment by its very nature injected a relatively heavy toll on our network. We anticipate lessening that burden.
As excited as we are about making the move in-house we need your assistance to ensure a smooth transition. The purpose of this communiqué is to inform and to make you aware that in order to accomplish the migration task email services will be interrupted beginning at 7:00 pm on Friday, July 1st through 8:00 am on Tuesday, July 5th. What this means to you is the following:
• For the duration of the interruption, the flow of email to your pc, workstations or devices connected to our current email system will stop. This is because we will have to migrate your existing email from the outsourced server to the in-house repository. We anticipate that this migration will go smoothly, however, since the data is flowing over the network, the speed of the migration will be impacted by the amount of traffic on the network. Minimal network traffic means maximum migration speed, thus our reason for choosing to do the migration on the weekend when networking traffic is minimized.
• No other systems will be affected. Jenzabar, MyDU, website access and other IT functions and resources will be unaffected albeit they may run a little slower than normal.
• For those of you using personal devices to receive Dillard email, you will more than likely see some strangeness associated with Dillard email delivery for the duration of the interruption. With so many devices in use out there I cannot begin to describe what your device will do. Just be aware that it may or may not function properly. Also note that the change will necessitate reconfiguring your device to ensure it works properly with the new environment once the migration is complete.
As usual thank you very much for your time, patience and understanding as we strive to deliver a quality product that we believe you truly deserve. In the event you have any questions, concerns or feedback please to not hesitate to call or email me directly and I will address your query as soon as possible. A second email will follow this one detailing what needs to be done on your pc, workstations and devices to ensure a seamless transition to the new service.
Thanks sincerely,
James P. Hobbs III
AVP Information Technology and Telecommunications
Dillard University
2601 Gentilly Boulevard
New Orleans, LA. 70122
jhobbs@dillard.edu
(504) 816-4716 phone
(504) 816-4889 fax
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