Changing Your Outlook

We are still on schedule to move to a new email service over Labor Day Weekend.  We will be bidding goodbye to Google's G Suite and moving to Microsoft's Exchange Online.

For the past few weeks, we have been  migrating your mail, contacts, and calendars to the new system.  This process is still ongoing.

Outlook Users

If you already use Microsoft Outlook for your work email, you are currently connecting to Google Mail to receive and send messages.  We will need to point Outlook to Microsoft's system at the appropriate time.  To facilitate this, we have a program called Outlook Assistant.  You can download and install this program now, and it will point your Outlook program to the new system at the appropriate time.

This week, you will receive an email with a link to download Outlook Assistant.  When you do so, you may be asked to create a password.

IMPORTANT: This will change your password for the Office 365 Portal.  If you already know your Office 365 password and want to keep it, simply enter that password.  If you don't know your password or want to change it, this will give you the opportunity to reset it.  This password must have at least 8 characters, both upper and lower case letters, and numbers.  Please remember what your password is.  If we have to change it before the migration is complete, your Outlook conversion will not work properly.

Once you enter a password, simply download and run the executable.  Once this is installed, you will not see any changes.  The program will wait until we tell it to make the switch to Exchange, then it will simply point your program to the new mailbox at the appropriate time.

If you do not install Outlook Assistant, you will no longer receive new emails once we cut over to the new system.

Non-Outlook Users

If you have not yet started using Outlook, and still rely on a web browser to get your mail, you will need to start going to a new web site for your mail.  Rather than going to gmail.com, your mail will start coming to outlook.office365.com.

This will be a new interface that looks a little different, but it will continue to provide browser based access to send and receive mail.

If you go to that web site now, you can see that most of your mail is already there.  Do not be concerned if some mail is missing.  We are still migrating mail, and your mailbox may not be complete.

IMPORTANT: Do not start sending mail from the Office 365 portal before the migration is complete, and do not make any changes to the mail in the new portal.  If you do, you will mess up the migration.  Do not delete messages.  Do not move them into folders. Do not try to send messages from there.  Do not make any changes at all.  You cannot start using the portal until the migration is complete.

If you want to begin using Outlook for your mail, but have not done so already, at this point I would recommend waiting until we make the final conversion.  At that point, you can simply run your initial setup of Outlook and begin using it with Microsoft Exchange Online.

Everyone

There will be some work to do once the migration is complete.  We are migrating your mail, contacts, and calendar.  You may lose some settings.  If you have filters set up to deal with messages, you will need to recreate those in Exchange.  If you have shared calendars with others, you will need to re-share them.  If you are using third party tools like Cloud HQ to share mail folders, those tools will no longer work.

Your labels/folders will move over, but going forward, you can only assign a message to one folder. If you have messages with more than one label during migration, they will be duplicated with a copy in each folder.

The exact timing of the final conversion to the new system is dependent on when the migration is complete.  Once we are confident of when that will happen, we will let everyone know the exact date and time of the cut-over.

Once cut-over is complete, there may be a short time when you still have access to your Gmail account, even though it will no longer be receiving any new messages.  This will give you a chance to confirm for yourself that everything moved properly.  However, once the migration is complete, you should not attempt to send messages from Gmail, nor make any other changes in the old system.

We plan to bring over the contents of your Google Drive to your personal Box folder.  Anything else you may use in Google that is tied to your work account (e.g. photos, chats, blogs, sites, etc.) will be gone once we shut down our Google account.