Rutgers e-mail system migration
As part of the President’s Strategic Plan for Rutgers University, all Rutgers email systems for faculty and staff, including rci and the SOE servers - soemail, and jove, will be moved onto Microsoft cloud, based on Office 365 (MS 365), and called Rutgers Connect. The Rutgers student e-mail system, eden, has been already moved to the Google cloud, called Scarletmail, in 2014.
Motivation
- Availability and continuity of e-mail communications in case of DDOS attacks onto RU networks and natural disasters, like hurricane Sandy in 2012: There will be a dedicated physical network connection between RU campuses and the MS 365 cloud, providing access to the email system in case of connectivity problems within RU as well as between RU and the Internet.
- Centralized and convenient calendaring system.
- Security and privacy: only Rutgers Connect email system will be allowed for business related communications within RU. It won't be allowed to automatically forward all the e-mail from Rutgers Connect to the other domains, such as gmail, yahoo, etc.
Migration and time lines
- This email migration will start in January of 2016. Because of the large volume of users, the migration will occur in phases. The schedule has not been finalized, so we don't know yet when our accounts will be migrated. But the plan is to have all faculty and staff email accounts migrated by the end of the summer (August 2016).
- Rutgers will move only one mail account per person, so if you are using two email accounts, we will need to manually move the second email account. This can be done at any time after the migration.
- OIT recommends using one domain for all Rutgers e-mails, @rutgers.edu. However, keeping the original domains is also possible, @jove.rutgers.edu, and @soemail.rutgers.edu, for example.
What services will come with Rutgers Connect
- Exchange (Email -50 GB Inbox size, 150 MB max attachment size , Calendar, Contacts, Tasks).
- Sharepoint (OneDrive - 1TB remote storage, Office Online tools).
- Skype for Business.
Accessing Rutgers Connect
- It can be accessed from Outlook, installable on MS Windows and Mac OSX.
- There are mobile apps available for mobile phones (iPhone and Android) and tablets (Android and iPad).
- Web access via most of the web browsers on various operating systems.