IT Development Team Launches New Exchange 2010 Email System
The IT Development team, headed by Kendra Ketchum, IT development director, migrated nearly 4,000 Texas Wesleyan staff and faculty email accounts and nearly 11,000 student and alumni accounts onto the new Exchange 2010 e-mail system between Friday, Sept. 23 and Thursday, Sept. 29.
With these accounts, the team migrated over 386 gigabytes of data at a success rate of 100 percent. All of the account upgrades were performed during after-hours maintenance periods between 6 p.m. and 8 a.m. over six nights, with a more than 128 hours spent migrating data. By performing the work overnight, the team was able to upgrade all accounts with minimal loss of service for faculty, staff, and students during regular school hours.
As a result of the e-mail upgrade, Texas Wesleyan students, faculty and staff all now reside on the same e-mail system, removing three older systems, including RamMail and providing a larger, more reliable e-mailing platform. A few highlighted features of the new University Email system include:
-E-mail boxes are now 10 times bigger (10MB increased to 1GB for students and 5GB for faculty and staff)
-E-mail can now be checked from your PC or mobile devices (iPhone, Android, iPad)
-Inboxes, Calendars, and Contacts can be synched between PCs, web browsers, and mobile devices
-Accounts now have full support for both PC or Mac
Early last month, the Texas Wesleyan School of Law, faculty, staff, students, and alumni, were migrated to the new University e-mail system.
As part of the migration strategy, IT held a Student E-mail and Mobile Setup Fair, Thursday, Sept. 29 on the Campus Mall. Refreshments were provided by Student Life. More than 250 students, faculty, staff and alumni were helped with their logins to email.txwes.edu or in setting up their mobile devices.
Felicia Nunez, a senior business management major and Student Worker in IT’s Media Services and Instructional Technology department was a tremendous help assisting the Wesleyan Community Log in and sync up their mobile devices with the new e-mail system. “I enjoyed helping the students set their email accounts up,” Nunez said, “many were excited over the features that Microsoft Exchange 2010 offers on both our computers and mobile devices.
“I’m not a student, but I thought it was a wonderful idea to bring the IT Helpdesk outside so that it was visible and accessible to many students, faculty, and staff,” Lori Logan, university controller, said. “I needed assistance to sync up my phone and was able to accomplish this quickly. Knowing that help was available between 9:30 a.m. and 2 a.m. allowed me to pop down to the mall at my convenience.”