Exchange 2007

UCit E-Mail Services will be deploying Exchange 2007 and retiring our Exchange 2003 servers over summer 2008.

*** New - Tentative Migration schedule

Deployment Plan

on July 2, 2008, the E-Mail Services team will deploy two new Exchange 2007 front end servers. These will support secure IMAP and secure POP as well as improved support for Active Sync. We will no longer support unsecure POP or IMAP. Please use UCMAIL.UC.EDU as the Exchange server name.  Do not point your client to the exact Exchange server.

We plan to move 5,000 mailboxes a night from an Exchange 2003 server to an Exchange 2007 server. We will publish a schedule and notify users whose accounts are moving a week ahead of time and then again the night before the move. Most users will not see an impact other than having to restart their e-mail programs. Microsoft Outlook will automatically detect the change and reconfigure the clients to access the mailboxes. Users using other e-mail clients may have to reconfigure their software.

Advantages

In conjunction with the upgrade to Exchange 2007, the email team is re-architecting the Exchange infrastructure to enable us to grow the quotas (as the storage space become available) and to provide a more reliable backup solution.

Other enhancements in Exchange 2007 include the following:

• Enhanced support for mobile devices. The Active Sync client has been licensed to most of the major cell phone manufacturers. (You must have a data plan on your phone.)
• Improved Calendar manipulation from a mobile device
• Outlook Anywhere:  a feature that lets a user can take a laptop with MS Outlook on it, and use any Internet connection to securely access his or her email accounts without firing up the VPN (Virtual Private Network).
• Enhanced Outlook Web Access Client.

Links:

Exchange 2007 FAQ

Deployment progress blog

Free Training videos

Why Exchange 2007?

You may have heard the news that UC is outsourcing student e-mail , and wonder why we are keeping employee e-mail in-house. The reasons are:  Security, Shared Calendars, Global Address book, and Business Continuity.

Even as a public university, we deal with a lot of confidential data. Everything from student identification covered under FERPA, and medical patient data from our colleagues and associates from the Medical College that is regulated by HIPPA, to donor and financial information is sent through the university's e-mail system. 

The University of Cincinnati, and particularly UCit, has a responsibility to see that this information is sent and stored in the most secure manner possible. A hosted provider can promise that e-mail is secured between the e-mail client and the host servers, but they do not reveal how that data is stored on their servers. It is also possible that the e-mail is electronically scanned for certain keywords. 

With the outsourced solution, we cannot provide shared calendars or the global address book.

The final reason for maintaining an in-house Exchange system for staff and faculty is to limit the risk that the hosting service might someday decided to change their business model and begin to charge educational institutions for e-mail.

The Gartner Group predicts  that students will abandon e-mail as a primary means of communication and instead use instant messaging and social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace. As they expect businesses to continue to use e-mail as a means of communication for many years to come, it puts us in a better position to maintain our own in-house e-mail system.