The Office of Information Technology would like to introduce a series of articles for the new central email, calendar, and cloud services system, Rutgers Connect, based on the Office 365 suite by Microsoft. This series of articles will serve as a resource for those that would like to read about new features being released as well as in-depth articles that will seek to explain the intricacies of the product. Over the past year, OIT has worked with all departments at the university to conduct the migration from departmental and central mail services, to one unified email and calendaring solution. We are now nearing the completion of this project and would like to provide a centralized informational resource for the Rutgers community and their new service.
In 2014 a committee of IT staff from across the university was formed and tasked to evaluate an enterprise-wide email and calendaring solution to meet the requirements of the President’s Strategic Plan. The goal was to provide better storage capacity, easier scheduling of meetings, improved reliability, and availability, and promote better collaboration throughout Rutgers University. A series of town hall meetings were held as forums for the committee to speak with other IT staff on the requirements, features and possible issues dealing with a university-wide solution. The enterprise email and calendaring committee also released a survey to faculty, staff, and students to allow them an opportunity to express their email and calendaring needs.
After careful vetting of the email and calendaring solutions available, the committee elected to choose Microsoft’s Office 365 in December 2015. Office 365 was selected for its offering of many different tools and its large amount of storage (1 terabyte of general storage and 50 gigabytes per mailbox for all users).
Office 365 is an extensive product, with a wide array of offerings that can facilitate the work efforts of the university and its members. In this series of articles, you’ll find information on the basics of the product including mail, calendar, and contacts. We will be providing an opportunity to delve deeper into the products and its components and learn about OneDrive, Skype for Business, Office Pro Plus and other collaborative features.
Our debut article will provide you with detailed information on Office 365’s security features and their integration with the university.