To keep up with today’s business and technology requirements, ITSC has been actively working in the past months to revamp our email infrastructure. After intensive evaluation and review, the Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 will be adopted as our new platform of messaging and collaboration for faculty and staff, and will replace our existing Email Server which has served us for around ten years and with limited capabilities.
Microsoft Exchange is known as the enterprise messaging platform which offers electronic mail, calendaring, contacts and tasks in one integrated platform. It supports synchronizing data with popular mobile devices that are running e.g. iOS, Android & BlackBerry OS. With Microsoft Exchange, we’re able to offer larger email quota (8Gb as default) and to bring in other new benefits to our faculty and staff. For more details, please see MS Exchange Email and Calendar Services for Staff.
Over the past month, ITSC has arranged briefing sessions to IDLPs and departmental technical colleagues. We have now over 200 colleagues migrated to Exchange and are participating in the pilot testing.
The University wide migration for staff shall start next week and over the summer period. Our colleagues will approach your IDLP to coordinate the Exchange migration for your office. A briefing session will be arranged for each office to address any queries you may have before the migration exercise. As Microsoft Exchange supports email clients commonly used on campus (e.g. Outlook, Thunderbird, HKUST webmail), users may continue to use such email client which they are acquainted with. The migration exercise is designed to be as transparent as possible and should cause minimal impact to most users.
As this is a large-scale migration exercise, it will take some time to complete and we seek for your kind support and patience. In the meantime, should you have any query, please feel free to contact us on ITSC Helpline ext. 6200 or to drop us an email at cchelp@ust.hk.
ITSC