The Culverhouse College of Business is now in the process of transitioning its internal email service to faculty, staff, and emeritus faculty away from Google products and towards Microsoft offerings, in alignment with the rest of The University of Alabama campus.
The benefits of this move are as follows:
- Better integration with campus-wide software and collaboration tools.
- Reduction in staffing demands to maintain a separate email system independent of campus OIT’s offerings.
- Vastly improved data security, supported by a campus-based cybersecurity team.
The email address issued to you by The University of Alabama — using your myBama name or your previously issued UA email account name — will be your email address going forward.
Emails sent to one’s @cba.ua.edu/@culverhouse.ua.edu address will be automatically forwarded to their @ua.edu address for a prescribed period.
What Can You Do Now?
You should start transitioning external work-related mailing list subscriptions, login credentials for websites and services, and other services to your ua.edu email address now.
In other words, if you receive communications from outside parties to your @cba.ua.edu/@culverhouse.ua.edu email address or use your @cba.ua.edu/@culverhouse.ua.edu email address as a user name to login to a website, take the time to change the email account used to your @ua.edu email address.
For non-work-related communications, you must use a personal email account. Refer to OIT’s policies for more info about personal communications using UA systems.
Wait to order new business cards until the transition is complete and any new email aliases are finalized.
Alert your contacts of your new email address and change your signature using UA’s signature tool.
And finally:
More information can be found on OIT’s O365 Email Migration website. This website has information to both prepare you for the migration and to guide you after your UA mailbox is moved to Office 365. The migration will occur transparently for most desktop and laptop users; however, email clients on mobile devices will need reconfiguration. Instructions are available on the website.
How to Prepare
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- As soon as you can, ensure that you can log in and access your UA email account. Visit outlook.com and sign in with your UA email address and myBama password. You should then receive a prompt for Duo two-factor authentication. If you have any issues logging in, please reset your myBama password. Once you have completed this step, in order to clear up confusion, it is best to not access your @ua.edu email for the remainder of the week. The migration preparation process happens in stages, and in order to migrate everyone to the O365 environment, the vendor performs a pre-cutover sync. This part of the preparation process will copy 95% of your content over to the @ua.edu email address destination. This means that you may see an update of emails and folders in your @ua.edu mailbox, but this does not indicate that you have been migrated. Once the actual migration is performed, starting at 5pm on Friday, the last 5% of your content will migrate over, along with the forwarding of your Gmail to O365.
- Please note that Gmail automatically categorizes some messages as being SOCIAL, UPDATES, FORUMS, or PROMOTIONS. Google’s standard behavior is to separate those emails into special areas within your Gmail inbox. Upon migration, all of those messages will be moved into your Outlook inbox and will not be categorized or separated.
- In order to avoid the possibility of having duplicated email, please confirm that all of the options for forwarding email from your @ua.edu address to your @cba.ua.edu address have been disabled. In the Outlook client, check SETTINGS / MAIL / FORWARDING and make certain that forwarding is not enabled. Then check SETTINGS / MAIL / RULES and turn off or delete any rules that would cause email to be forwarded from your Outlook account to Gmail.
- If you have already forwarded your Gmail to Outlook and have been using outlook as your email client: You may run the risk of having email duplicated during migration. In order to avoid this situation, you may consider creating a single uniquely named folder (for example “10-23Migration” ) in the root of your Outlook Inbox and then moving all emails and folders from the root of your Outlook inbox into that newly created folder.
Frequently Asked Questions
What does this all mean?
Culverhouse will abandon Gmail, Google calendars, drive, documents, and all other Google services.
Do I have to move?
Yes, eventually everyone will move and the Google hosted domain will be abandoned.
What will I use in the place of the Google Apps?
Microsoft Outlook Mail, O365, OneDrive, SharePoint, Teams, etc. For a complete list of Google/Microsoft tool comparisons, please visit OIT’s website.
Will we still have an @cba.ua.edu or @culverhouse.ua.edu address?
No. We will abandon our custom domain and move to @ua.edu addresses.
What will my new email name be?
This depends on several factors. Everyone will have access to the existing Outlook email that is already maintained by UA. Your username will match your existing username in O365 which should match your myBama logon.
My username in myBama / O365 doesn’t reflect my current name. What should I do?
Contact the IT Service Desk (itservicedesk@ua.edu) after the migration process has ended.
What will happen to my data?
OIT is engaging 3Cloud to do the migration. They will work closely with us to move your email, calendar, contacts, and items in Google Drive into the Microsoft environment.
I have many folders in my email, how will this be handled?
The migration process will preserve the primary folder in which the email was located.
Will my calendars and permissions be migrated?
Your primary calendar will be migrated. Additional calendars may need to be migrated separately. Permissions and shared calendars will need to be reestablished.
What about my shared Google Docs?
Your documents will be migrated, but shared documents will need to be re-shared. Faculty & staff should use Microsoft OneDrive. Retirees should store content in personal storage space. Box is another cloud storage platform available to current UA faculty, staff and students; however, OneDrive is the recommended storage platform.
How will people find me?
For a time, we will forward CBA email to your new address. During this time, it will be very important for you to notify those that email you and to change your email address in whatever services you might use.
What about the printed / published / web material with my old email?
OIT’s Customer Relations team will collaborate with our own Marketing and Communications team to discuss strategies for the move. This has been done on campus in the past so they have some experience.
What will happen to the various internal college distribution lists?
Internal lists such as “All Econ Faculty”, “Dean’s Office Staff”, or “Budget Managers” will be created within the new mail system and the Technology Group will have the ability to manage them.
How will I communicate with students in my classes?
Blackboard remains the official method of communicating with students at UA. You can work with the Center of Instructional Technology to learn how to reach your classes or multiple sections of classes.
How will I communicate with students whose grouping is not defined by a class / section?
We will be working with OIT to automatically create and populate the necessary mailing lists with UA LISTSERV.
What happens to email for retired faculty and staff?
- At the current time retired faculty retain access to email after departure – the primary email address for retirees is changed to mybamausername@retiree.ua.
edu (retired faculty still sign in to all services using the unchanged username of mybamausername@ua.edu). All aliases are left on the account, so incoming mail is unaffected. Emeriti can request exemption to the @retiree address through the Provosts’ office, as can any retired faculty who are still doing work on behalf of the University — more info about emeriti/retired email access can be found here. - As of February 1st, 2022, an update to the University’s Terms of Use for Electronic Accounts states that new staff retirees’ with an @ua.edu email account will be discontinued one day after date of retirement. Staff retirees with a legitimate email business need that may affect University operations and/or students may request — with advanced approval at the direction of Human Resources — that access be continued for a specific time period. Current Culverhouse retirees will be grandfathered into this policy as though they had retired prior to the cutoff date. Any Culverhouse staff employees who will retire post-migration will adhere to the policy that states the email account will be discontinued one day after date of retirement.
- All current faculty and staff retiree with a @cba and/or @edu email addresses currently in use will be changed to username@retiree.ua.edu. This change will be managed by UA’s Office of Information Technology (OIT), and no action is required. Retirees will continue to log in and access their email account with the username@ua.edu account. Additionally, Microsoft multi-factor authentication continues to be required to access the account.
- The new email address is only a change to the email address name. All of the existing emails will remain in the account, and all emails sent to the @ua.eduemail address will continue to be delivered. All new outgoing mail from the account will be sent with the new @retiree.ua.edu account name.
- Current Culverhouse retirees should begin using the new username@retiree.ua.edu account as their primary UA email account beginning December 18, 2023.
When will this happen?
We anticipate the migration to begin in October.
Will you help me use the new system?
Yes, we will have group sessions and one-on-one training available.
What do I need to do now?
See above for immediate tasks that you can fulfill. Some of you may receive emails from John Baker or Shawn Gendle, asking specific questions about you or your department’s email needs and usage.
You may have other questions not answered in the FAQ above. Please direct those to John Baker at jbaker@ua.edu