Plans for Move to Office 365 Underway
Office 365 is a cloud-based, off-premises email, calendaring, storage and collaboration suite.
In preparation for Office 365, ITS has invested significant time and resources in a phased approach, including extensively researching security for sensitive data, testing internally, replacing aging 2010 hardware, pre-positioning all 2010 mailboxes to 2013 infrastructure, and migrating small pilot groups and then broadening out to other groups that volunteered.
The move to Office 365 will affect nearly everyone on campus. Office 365 is a cloud-based, off-premises email, calendaring, storage and collaboration suite that strongly resembles the current on-premises MS Exchange and MS Office services and the previously used MS SharePoint service. Undergraduate students already use cloud-based Office 365 for their email and calendaring. Faculty, graduate students and staff will migrate over to Office 365. The entire campus will enable OneDrive storage, which has enhanced built-in digital rights management, within the next year.
Carolina is moving to Office 365 because it provides more storage and strong security, complements the technology environment on campus, reduces the total cost of ownership for the University and is accessible wherever there is network connectivity.
Comparing Exchange and Office 365
Current:![]() |
Future:![]() |
|
Availability | 99% | 99.9% |
Email Storage | Yes | Yes |
Personal Storage | Yes | Yes |
Amount of Storage (Email) | 2 GB (no archive) | 50 GB+ unlimited archive |
Cost Savings | Save $250k/yr in local hardware costs | |
Digital Rights Management | No | Yes |
Data Loss Prevention | No | Yes |
File Sharing | No | Yes |
OneDrive | N/A | 1TB Now (unlimited later) |