Background
In November 2009, the University announced plans to provide basic email services to faculty and staff. The new email service, called FASmail, is an enterprise email service for faculty, staff and student employees of the University of British Columbia. The FASmail service furthers the academic mission of the University by providing timely and immediate communications access to the University, other institutions, organizations and individuals and will provide a platform for new technologies such as improved voice mail and unified messaging.
A project is underway to complete the migration of the UBC Exchange 2007 users (over 5,000) to FASmail over the remainder of the 2011 year and the first half of 2012.
Migration Process
To facilitate the smooth transition of UBC Exchange 2007 users to FASmail, UBC IT introduced a change in April 2011 to allow current and future FASmail users to better communicate and book meetings with the UBC Exchange 2007 users.
Specifically, FASmail users are able to:
- See all of the UBC Exchange 2007 users in their global address list (GAL)
- View free/busy time when booking a meeting with UBC Exchange 2007 users
- Book UBC Exchange 2007 resources such as meeting rooms and equipment
- Use existing UBC Exchange 2007 distribution lists.
Unfortunately, current UBC Exchange 2007 users will not be able to view information (noted above) for the new FASmail users. They will only be able to see those who have been migrated from Exchange 2007 to FASmail.
As part of the beta test phase of the project, UBC IT has now been successfully migrated from Exchange 2007 to FASmail (November/December 2011.) The team has also successfully migrated a number of small faculty pilot groups including MOA, Land and Food Systems, Arts IT, and Forestry. UBC IT is now in the process of contacting department IT Administrators to determine a migration date in the first or second quarter of 2012.
A schedule of these planned migrations will soon be posted on this web page.
