Office 365 Migration Overview

 

Snow College migration to the Microsoft Office 365 Email

 

Snow College currently uses Microsoft Exchange Server — hosted on campus — to support EMail for faculty and staff. Since the equipment is located at the college, IT must support and maintain it, while ensuring that the infrastructure keeps up with the college’s growth and platform evolution.  When mailboxes are in the cloud, Microsoft does that for us.  The Microsoft cloud will provide the most up-to-date tools and features for faculty, staff, and eventually students.

 

Although Microsoft cloud integrates with desktop and mobile clients, such as Outlook, we recommend using the web-based applications because they provide full access to all the latest features. They also provide one space where users can access all their other Microsoft cloud applications and documents. For instance, from EMail in Outlook Web Access (OWA), a user can open Word, teams, or Excel to create, edit, chat, conference or share documents.

 

We are used to downloading and installing applications and having them on our devices. But those applications require updates and use more processing power, meaning we need more high-end computers to run them. However, if we shift how we work into a web browser with tabs, we can have a Word document, a PowerPoint document, and EMail open — it's all right there.

The Microsoft cloud provides more interoperability. The cloud is like a digital bridge that enables applications to connect to each other. For instance, Outlook and Teams interact with each other, primarily through the Calendar integration.

The Microsoft cloud also enables users to work from any internet-connected device. So if your personal device isn’t available, you can log in on any other device and access your EMail, Word, PowerPoint, Excel, and other Microsoft cloud accounts.

Other changes include an increase in mailbox storage to100GB and a decrease in the retention of deleted items from 90 days to 30 days.