Athens, Ga. – The University of Georgia will upgrade its email and calendar system to Office 365 Aug. 2-4. During the upgrade, UGAMail will be accessible and email will continue to be sent, but there may be brief outages while accounts are being transitioned.
The university will migrate from Microsoft’s Live@edu platform to its cloud-based email, calendar and task service, Office 365 Education, starting Aug. 2 at 6 p.m. The upgrade is expected to end the evening of Aug. 4, however, it could take additional time.
“The University of Georgia has been working closely with Microsoft consultants for several months to make this transition to Office 365 Education as smooth as possible,” said Michael Lucas, associate CIO for infrastructure and research computing at UGA. “Still, we’re advising the university community to be aware of this email upgrade during this particular weekend, which was selected because its poses fewer disruptions after summer commencement, but before fall classes start. We’re also recommending that users not plan to send important university-related emails during that weekend because email access may be intermittent during the upgrade timeframe.”
Microsoft is requiring its education clients to upgrade from Live@edu to Office 365 Education by September.
UGAMail users should update any software before the upgrade. Some older software packages—such as Office 2003 or Internet Explorer 7—will not be supported by Office 365 Education.
Both during and after the upgrade, there should be no service disruption in email clients and on mobile devices. However, some users may be prompted to provide their credentials again. In addition, anyone actively logged into the Outlook Web Application may be disconnected from a session. If that happens, restart the Web browser.
The upgrade will increase email storage from 10GB to 25GB.
And after the upgrade, users will have two accounts: Their UGAMail account, which is managed by the university, for email, calendar and task functions; and their personal Microsoft consumer account, which is managed by Microsoft. The Microsoft consumer accounts will give users access to Microsoft consumer products, such as SkyDrive and Skype (Messenger).
When the upgrade is complete, users will be asked to verify their Microsoft consumer accounts. Initially, user names and passwords will remain the same for both accounts. But, if a Microsoft account password is changed, the account will no longer sync with the UGAMail password.
The upgrade will not change UGAMail account user names or passwords.
Also during and continuing for up to a week after the upgrade, account holders should contact the EITS Help Desk at 706-542-3106 or helpdesk@uga.edu to create a UGAMail account or change a user name or password.
The university’s central IT department, Enterprise Information Technology Services, manages UGAMail accounts. EITS has instructions and frequently asked questions available at office365.uga.edu.
