Stellar job completed – All Emails Moved to Office 365 for School of Physics and Astronomy 

In a move to modernise and enhance the security of email services, all remaining externally hosted mail accounts were successfully migrated to UoE Microsoft Office 365 accounts. 

The Institute for Astronomy (IfA) is a major component of the School of Physics and Astronomy (SoPA), whose astronomers collaborate and share facilities with government funded scientists at the Royal Observatory Edinburgh (RoE). 

In October 2022, over 140 staff and student accounts affiliated with the IfA were successfully migrated from an externally hosted legacy Exchange Server managed by the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC) to our in-house Microsoft Office 365.

This newer system is more secure and uniformly used across the UoE, allowing full-service support to the user.  

IfA staff and students now hold only one mailbox removing the reliance on auto-forwarding messages, an outdated work-around and known risk to information security within organisations that was phased out by the University.

The users retain the ability to choose their preferred domain address to affiliate this with, roe.ac.uk or ed.ac.uk. 

This project oversaw the migration of the final set of users to the central University email service.

This is a major milestone for the University and concludes a vast programme of work started 10 years ago to migrate the many different email systems used then to one single email service in Microsoft Office 365.