Plans for Move to Office 365 Underway

As ITS continues to work toward moving the campus to Microsoft Office 365, ITS piloted the email portion of the migration over the first quarter of 2016 with its own units, as well as such campus groups as OASIS and the Frank Porter Graham Child Development Institute. With these groups, the Office 365 migration experience was nearly seamless. Earlier, starting in April 2015, ITS migrated the campus to SharePoint in the cloud. As of mid-July, Carolina’s migration to SharePoint was nearly finished–only one site remained.

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)