What is Office 365?
This document is the narrative of our transition experience and a "choose your own adventure" for your own transition experience
Office 365 is an enterprise email, calendaring and notes platform based in the cloud on Microsoft's servers in their data centers. The email on these servers is owned by MIT via contractual agreement with Microsoft.
Starting Fall of 2022, IS&T is in the process of transitioning the entire MIT Academic community from the current onsite IS&T Exchange email servers to cloud-based Office 365 Email.
What needs to be done pre-transition
Test certificates here to make sure they are installed and working in your browser of choice.
https://web-cert.mit.edu/certificates/test/index.html
For users who prefer not to use Certificates, kerberos usernames and passwords in Touchstone will indeed still work as it is paired with DUO authentication.
On Monday September 19th 2022, Albert and Dan were migrated from MIT Exchange to MIT O365 Email. As Apple Mail and iCal users these are the notes of what they saw.
When the cut over from MIT Exchange to MIT O365 occurs we saw errors in Apple Mail. This means that our email has been transitioned to O365 and we should stop using MIT Exchange as it no longer works.
The IS&T O365 representative will work with each DLC's Administrative Officer or Program Administrator to determined the date and time when the emails for everyone in the DLC will be migrated from the MIT Exchange servers. When the cut over from MIT Exchange to O365 Email happens it will be up to each user (with any available local IT help) to delete their old email settings and add an Exchange Email account back into the client program, if needed. Most MS Outlook client users won't need to do anything (except maybe approve the change to the new O365 servers in Windows 10). Apple Mail users will need to remove their old broken Exchange accounts and add a new Exchange email account for O365. There will be NO notification from IS&T that the migrations are done or that the cutover has happened. It will just happen at the appointed date and time and when it does, you will begin to see errors from your email client.
At the cutover date and time the migration will have completed and access to the old MIT Exchange Email will be cut off and access to your emails on O365 is online and active.
Most users will need to delete their old MIT Exchange settings from Apple Mail and add the new MIT O365 Mail account.
These were the screens that Albert saw after he deleted his old Exchange Email account from Apple Mail and clicked to set up a new Exchange Account in order to set up the MIT O365 Email.
Type in your full name as it appears in the MIT directory followed by your full MIT email address.
Click on "Sign In".
If you have your certificates installed, click on "Use Certificate - Go". Otherwise log in with your kerberos username and password.
Select your Duo Authentication Device. Move the bottom left-right scrollbar right to see the buttons.
Click on the button of the appropriate Duo method you want to use.
Select on the services you need/use that were in Exchange.
For Albert there were about 42k email messages that took 5 hours to download on campus over an Ethernet connection. At home he left his machine running overnight. Home internet speeds will vary depending on your plan. Since the end of Net Neutrality, cheaper ISP plans usually mean slower download speeds. Make sure your home machines have their sleep or power saver settings turned off.
Apple Mail was NOT really usable on the Mac at all while email was downloading from O365. Apple Mail was unresponsive and looked like it was hung most of the time. This is normal behavior. We recommend users leave Apple Mail running to download the emails but do NOT use it to check or send emails while it is busy downloading from the Outlook365 cloud. Instead, use the NEW O365 OWA webmail on your preferred browser which can be found at outlook.office.com . Users who have been migrated to O365 should stop using the old Exchange OWA (owa.mit.edu). It will no longer work for you.
The new email O365 OWA Webmail is at outlook.office.com . Instructions on how to use it can be found here:
https://kb.mit.edu/confluence/display/istcontrib/Office+365+Post-Migration+-+Web
All iOS and Android devices will need to have the email accounts deleted from the devices and added again as the old Exchange accounts are now on Office 365.