UPDATE 7/8/2013: Our email upgrade is complete. Thank you for your patience while we completed this important task.
UPDATE: 7/5/13 10:27 am:Bringing up student accounts by class. This will take most of the day.
UPDATE: 7/4/13 6:36 pm: All Faculty/Staff mailboxes now functional.
UPDATE: 7/4/13 5:09 pm: Faculty/Staff mailboxes G-M are now functional.
UPDATE : 7/4/13 12:08 pm: Priority mailboxes are now functional. Faculty/Staff mailboxes N-Z are now functional. Check back here for updates.
ORIGINAL ANNOUNCEMENT:
Hello and Happy Summer!
We will be upgrading our email system beginning Wednesday afternoon, July 3. Email will be UNAVAILABLE July 3 & 4. Some mailboxes will be available beginning July 5th. Upgrade should be fully complete July 8. Please plan on contacting the school by phone if you need assistance during this time.
There will be a notification on our website that the email system is being upgraded and email response will be unavailable during the upgrade period. If you have urgent email, please plan to use an alternate personal email address during the upgrade period.
Here’s the plan:
Wednesday morning July 3rd
We will add an additional server. This will cause a message to pop up about an untrusted certificate; you can ignore this message throughout the upgrade process.
Late afternoon on July 3rd
The entire mail system will be taken down in order to complete upgrade our mail server software. Once that’s done we’ll everyone's e-mailboxes to the new server. We’re reserving the entire weekend for possible downtime but we hope to be done much earlier.
July 4-7
Upgrade continues. E-mailbox moves begin and those moved mailboxes will begin working.
Monday morning, July 8
Email upgrade completed. We will send out another email when we have finished the upgrade.
FAQ
Q: Will there be any mail loss during this process?
A: No. Mail will stored and will be delivered once the upgrade and e-mailbox moves are complete.
Q: What happens to the mail I send during the downtime?
A: If possible, please try not to send anything during the email downtime. If you do send email, it will sit on your computer. To get this mail to send once the system is back online just restart Outlook.
Q: Do I need to do anything to reconnect my mobile devices?
A: Probably not. For most devices and software this should be transparent, but we can’t test every combination. If you’re still having problems on Monday please email helpdesk@catlin.edu and we’ll take a look.
Q: Why the upgrade?
A: We’re currently using an old version of our email system (called Exchange 2007) installed on older hardware with limited capacity. The new hardware will quadruple our current performance and provide 10 times our current storage.
Q: What’s in it for me?
A: There are drastic improvements to Exchange in the past two versions. The most noticeable for most people will be Web access. Outlook Web Access now fully supports Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome. We’ll also see some performance improvements. Later we’ll get a big improvement to archiving, stay tuned in the fall for more information.
Q: What the timeframe for the upgrade?
A: We plan to have most departments back online by Friday, with the entire upgrade completed by Monday July 8th. We’re concentrating our efforts on users that are still on campus working and then completing everyone else throughout the remainder of the project.
Q: What version are we upgrading to?
A: Exchange 2013
If you have any questions/concerns, please email helpdesk@catlin.edu. If you need to contact IT during the upgrade, please phone us.
Enjoy your email-free 4th of July holiday!
Daisy
Daisy H. Steele
Associate IT Director
Acting IT Director
Catlin Gabel School
steeled@catlin.edu
503-297-1894 x264