Employee Email, Calendar Systems Scheduled for Transition

Pacific University employees will move from Outlook Exchange to Gmail for email and calendar systems on July 30.

This ambitious project will unify student and employee email and calendar systems, which have caused many inefficiencies.

The transition will take place at 5 p.m. PST on July 30, 2021. 

Why the Change?

The transition comes with lots of benefits:

  • Faculty and staff will be able to share their calendars with students, which will reduce a bottleneck in coordinating office hours and faculty availability.
  • The new system provides HIPAA/FERPA advanced encryption protection, reducing a major headache for Health Professions and Optometry students’ communication with faculty, as well as enabling clinical communication not currently available with non-pacific healthcare professionals.
  • Emails from faculty and staff will no longer get caught in students’ spam filters.
  • The Google Workspace offers university-wide instant messaging capabilities.
  • Plus, Google Workspace will bring:
    • Improved search capabilities
    • Increased mailbox size quotas
    • Better spam and phishing protection
    • Improved communication with and collaboration with students
    • More protection against hackers trying to gain access to your email
  • Mac users: UIS also is happy to introduce support for native Apple applications, such as MacOS Mail, Calendar, etc., as well as for the new Outlook for Mac experience. This means you can choose the mail and calendar access that works best for you.

How to Prepare

Google offers online informational resources for switching from Outlook to Gmail and making Gmail look like Outlook.

The UIS Helpdesk Knowledgebase also will be updated with soon with additional support information specific to Pacific users.

Additionally, UIS will host two virtual training sessions via Zoom to help employees with the transition. Learn how to use the Gmail and Google Calendar web interfaces from 1 to 2 p.m. Tuesday, July 20 (prior to the conversion), and learn how to use Outlook for Google mail and calendaring from 1 to 2 p.m. Monday, Aug. 9. Both sessions will be recorded and made available after their conclusion.

Though using the new system may take some adjustment, employees do not have to take any action to prepare for the conversion. UIS will migrate all of your existing email and calendar data to Google in advance of the conversion.

Friday, June 11, 2021