From the IT Help Desk: MLS will be switching from Convergence Email to Microsoft Office 365

The MLS Information Technology Department is excited to announce that on December 13^th, 2014 we will be switching from OneNet’s Convergence webmail to Microsoft Office 365.

Below are a few of the many great features Office 365 email has to offer:

• Reliability – Office 365 uses Exchange email, the most widely used enterprise email in the world. The main difference is it’s hosted on the cloud and not at our location. Microsoft has data centers that are distributed across the country allowing them to offer their customers a 99.9% guaranteed uptime.
• Security -  Office 365 applications are accessed through 128-bit SSL/TSL encryption so that if a transmission is intercepted by someone without authorization, they won't be able to read it. Office 365 also has a built-in Malware scanner and Spam filtering. Your spam messages will be delivered to your “Junk” folder so you won’t have to call IT any more to see if you have any emails that might have been caught by our spam filter.
• Compliance - Microsoft Office 365 services have been certified as compliant with ISO 27001 standards. Microsoft has also added controls for helping customers comply with HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) and FERPA (Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act).
• Lots of storage – Each user will have a 50GB mailbox.
• A Calendar that works! – Office 365’s calendar is very robust. You can create shared calendars with other staff. Shared calendars let you see when people are free or busy at any time.
• Access multiple mailboxes without having to log out. – Office 365 allows administrators to delegate access to other mailboxes. For example, Cheryl Mann also checks the mailbox for [email protected]. She will now be able to check her mail on the other account without having to log out of her [email protected] account. It will open the inbox in a new tab and both tabs will be logged into different accounts simultaneously.

So what’s next?

Below is a summary of the steps that are required to proceed with the migration. Some new procedures might be added between now and switch over date. Stay tuned to the Questions and Answers page on the Intranet to stay current.

Importing users into Office 365

All current staff members have already been imported into Office 365. Your username will be your email address. Your initial password on the day we launch will be your first and last initials along with your last 4 digits of your SSN. For example: John Doe with last 4 SSN of 1234 would log in with the password: J.D.1234. We needed to use a number that only the staff member should know, so we chose last 4 of SSN. The other option was Date of Birth, but all DOB’s are visible on our Who’s Who page.

Migrating current email messages and folders to new accounts

We will be utilizing two methods to migrate our staff’s email accounts:

Lighter Used accounts

These accounts will be:

Delivery Drivers
Library Aides
Custodians
Youth Assistants
Outreach Project Specialists

These accounts get much less use than other staff accounts so they do not need the same type of migration that the rest of the staff accounts require.

This migration method will utilize Office 365’s built-in migration tool. We will use it for specific job positions that do not utilize email as much as other positions. It requires that the CURRENT passwords be reset so it can connect to the current email accounts and copy the email messages over to the new account. We will send out an either an email or a paper notice to each of these staff members informing them of their new password and the date we will reset the password. It is VERY important that after we reset these passwords that the users do not change the password until the migration is complete. Doing so will result in the email messages not being copied over to the new accounts. The password will be the same initial password that we assigned to your Office 365 account so you aren’t having to remember two new passwords.

For all other staff:

Exporting your personal address books and distribution lists

IT will be posting tutorials for exporting your personal address books from Convergence and Thunderbird and how to import them into your Office 365 email account. If you have any personal “groups/distribution lists” you will have to manually recreate those on Office 365, but we will post a tutorial on how to get a list of email addresses in each group so you will have a template for creating your new groups.

Switchover Date

Shortly after the libraries close at 5pm on Saturday, December 13^th we will make a change in our DNS records that will start routing all email to your new accounts. The process can often take a few hours before all email that comes in will go to your new account. During that time, some emails could continue to arrive into your old account, while others arrive in your new account, depending on where the email came from and what servers they were routed through to get here. We will do one final “Delta pass” on Sunday where we will connect to your old account and grab any messages that appeared after the switchover. So the first time you log into your account, you could be missing a few emails, but don’t worry, they will eventually show up after the final Delta pass.

How do I access my new email?

You will go to the same website you went before: http://webmail.metrolibrary.org. We will point that address to the new Office 365 portal.

Questions and Answers

A Q&A page has been created on the Intranet to give staff a place to ask questions (by use of comments) and IT Staff will try to answer your questions. We do ask that you do not call IT Department regarding the Office 365 migration until after the switchover date. Place any of those questions in the Q&A page and we will answer them as soon as we can.

Click here for the Questions and Answers page.