On the week of November 10, UW-Whitewater’s email systems were transitioned from Outlook to Office 365. This change was initiated to help the people on campus and their needs to communicate. The change was supposed to take place a year ago, but COVID-19 postponed the progress. Office 365 or O365 took effect because of the larger mailbox size due to its cloud based storage, up to 100 GB, and many other technology vendors, for example the UW-W App, are integrating such applications. 

Before the email transition, all data for the previous email system was stored on campus in the McGraw Data Center. This limited storage capacity made it difficult to keep up with maintaining the physical servers and created numerous other issues. 

The UW-W ICIT had to transition over 14,000 mailboxes to ensure every user was on the same system. They did so with 95 percent complete migration in the first few weeks. If there was an issue they quickly resolved it with their staff at the Help Desk. 

Technology Adoption Coordinator Kirsten Mortimer explained that ICIT will be testing, troubleshooting and readily available to suit any campus user’s needs. It was noted that anyone experiencing difficulty should contact the Help Desk or look at the online resources listed on the ICIT UW-W website. 

Mortimer took note of how the switch was inconvenient during the middle of the semester, but since they have been working for months on this one project, everything underwent happened very successfully. 

“ICIT is here for you and can usually solve issues, particularly with accessing the email on your phone, very quickly, said Mortimer. “In the long-run, we’ll see many benefits to this change.” 

Mortimer reinforces the fact that ICIT is there for the campus users’ disclosure, and includes notes about the systems transferring onto phones because it was one of the transferring issues. 

Nothing but positive feedback has been heard from ICIT. Every now and then there are a few issues left to resolve, but Mortimer ensures that happy campus members are the top priority for her team.