New Email and Calendar Service Coming this Summer

Stanford’s email and calendar systems are moving to the cloud. The Cloud Collaboration project kicked off in November, and will be continuing through the summer of 2015. 

Over the last several years, a team of University IT staff along with some of our campus partners conducted a discovery project to evaluate cloud email and calendar systems. After narrowing the choices to Google’s Gmail and Microsoft’s Office 365, University management determined that a hybrid solution consisting of Office 365 and an Exchange on-premise environment would best meet the email, calendar, and collaboration needs for Stanford. This project will implement Microsoft’s free Office 365 offering (known as E1 for Education).

University IT will provide Office 365/Exchange services and the free Microsoft cloud collaboration suite. Because this project has a very tight timeline, we're not planning to implement all of the available tools in the E1 offering. Here are the services that we plan to support at the end of the project:

•    Office 365 Email and Calendar for the campus community (with exceptions noted below)
•    On-premise Exchange mailbox and calendar service for departments/people who request this service
•    Gmail and Google Calendar for returning undergraduate students and GSB
•    Microsoft OneDrive for campus collaboration (including its cloud SharePoint infrastructure)
•    MS Office suite for online document collaboration
•    A Google account with Google Drive enabled (remains as is)

 
The default offering will be Office 365, with on-premise Exchange available on an exception basis. GSB community members will continue to receive Gmail and Google Calendar accounts, and the Law School will continue using its separate Google environment.

The planned date for the migration to the new environment is July/August 2015.  In addition to working with our colleagues across University IT to plan, define, develop, and implement the integration and infrastructure needed, the project team will be working with our existing group of Campus Email Partners to ensure the new services meet the needs of the campus community.