From the Office of the CIO: Email and Calendar Upgrades, Wireless Expansion

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Keene State College faculty and staff can expect a number of improvements to some key IT services later this year — including more email storage and enhanced mobile support. KSC is partnering with Microsoft to provide email, calendar services and other collaboration tools to the college through its Office 365 Education Platform. The first phase of the project will be to transition all faculty and staff email and calendaring functions from on-site Exchange (Outlook) application to the Microsoft cloud based platform. Faculty and staff will continue to utilize the @keene.edu domain but the infrastructure to support it is moving off campus. Additional phases will be adding students, additional storage and collaboration tools.

Primary factors driving the change was our desire to provide the KSC community with modern tools that one can expect to find in the workplace that are robust, innovative and financially sustainable for KSC. The ITGroup has done its best in keeping our current Exchange email and calendar system running but our applications are outdated with limited functionality and require a major version upgrade. Running outdated versions not only limits functionality and meeting business needs but also exposes the college to an increased risk with regards to service reliability. Moving to Office 365 is big leap forward with enhanced functionality, availability, and security. There is also a strong business case for working with Microsoft. Office 365 provides an ideal balance between quality of services, cost avoidance and security of our data!

Enhanced Features:

• More storage - 50 GB of space per email account.
• Full integration with existing Exchange-Outlook desktop client and Microsoft Office tools
• Improved tools and capabilities including enhanced webmail functionality and mobile support for iPhone, Windows, Blackberry or Android smartphones.
• Supports best practices related to data security, protection and management
• Improved business continuity – financially backed, 99.99% uptime availability

From a data perspective, the most significant change is that KSC’s email and calendar data will now be hosted in “the cloud” — not on campus, but on servers around the globe.

While the data will be hosted by Microsoft, it remains the property of KSC. Microsoft does not advertise on the service and only has access to the data or service with KSC’s permission.

What’s next?
Office 365 will be available to the KSC community in the Spring, 2014.

The ITG is currently developing a comprehensive implementation plan to support the transition, and those details will be shared in the coming weeks and months. Our goal is to have all KSC email accounts moved to Office 365 by end of May 2014

The college is also nearing completion of the deployment of end to end wireless on the campus. Over the Fall/Winter break IT staff have been busy filling in the gaps where wireless performance was less than optimum on campus. We are now turning our efforts to providing wireless in some green spaces (outdoors) across the campus. Using the Facilities Master Plan as our guide for campus pathways we will be extending our wireless to the north/south and east/west. Once completed, you can experience wireless connectivity down Apian Way from gate to Owls nest including the Quad and area behind Spaulding Gym. Additionally, wireless connectivity will be available from TDS building to Redfern Arts Center. Expected completion date is April 2014.