Migration of Staff Email to Exchange Online
Y F Lai, Head of Infrastructure Systems
Since the University's adoption of Microsoft Office 365 a few years ago, it has continuously improved with enriched functionalities and become a popular platform for many enterprises. The student email was migrated to it since 2014 while the staff email has been supported using a complicated on-premises Exchange setup. With the continuous improvement of Office 365 in terms of stability, performance, functionalities and security, we believe it is high time to bring these benefits to staff users as well and further ease off collborative uses of Office 365 between staff and students. As such, we have initiated a large-scale migration of the staff email from on-premises Exchange to Office 365 Exchange Online earlier this year.
New features and enhancements are continuously added to Exchange Online and here are just some of them:
- Larger Mailbox - 100GB mailbox quota and unlimited archive mailbox storage space
- Seamless Integration with OneDrive - directly saves email attachment to your 5TB OneDrive for Business cloud storage
- A Highly Modernized Outlook Web Client
- Advanced Email Threat Protection
Besides these usability features, email access security can be further strengthened with device registration and two-factor authentication (2FA). These added cybersecurity features are currently in pilot use in certain offices and will be made generally available at a later stage.
The migration exercise has been taking place since June and more than half of our departments / offices have already been migrated to Exchange Online. The whole migration exercise will complete by the end of this year. Please refer to the following for more details:
https://itsc.ust.hk/services/general-it-services/communication-collaboration/email/exchange-online
