Information Regarding Century College's Conversion to Microsoft
Background Information
In a little over a month, we will begin our final migration from our current network system (Novell) to Microsoft. As you may recall, this migration will occur over Spring Break week (beginning Sunday, March 16 and continuing through the following Sunday, March 23). Our Microsoft system has been fully built and is operating well - just waiting for the conversion!
Outlook (E-mail) Training Classes Available!
In preparation for the Spring Break migration from GroupWise to Outlook (email) and Microsoft Active Directory (login security) we have scheduled a number of Outlook training classes.
Starting Tuesday of next week we have classes available for Outlook Training in advance of implementation. This training will help those staff with an overview of Outlook's main application screen and basic functions. We are scheduling this training through the Stars system you already use to sign up for other training classes. Many classes are listed now and more will be posted as soon as we can schedule them:
https://secure.mnsu.edu/mnscupd/login/default.asp?campusid=0304
Please register in advance as classes with less than 5 students registered two days in advance of the session will be canceled. Students registered for canceled classes will be notified to reschedule for another session.
Shortly after migration we will continue with class sessions and those will be added to the Stars system soon.
This migration will make some major changes that will position Century to have technology options that were much more difficult to deploy from Novell. Changing to a different email application may be challenging for some employees; others have already used Outlook and can be resources for those who are learning.
What will happen during the conversion (*and how can you prepare now*)?
During this time, we will be migrating employee and student accounts and data files from our current servers into the new Microsoft environment. To accomplish this migration, there will be a period of time during which access to the H:\, I:\ and J:\ drives will be unavailable. We are working with our consultants to determine exactly how long this period may be and will send out the exact downtimes in a future update.
* The less we have to migrate, the shorter the downtime! Now is a good time to look ahead and begin "spring cleaning" of your network files.
Also, during the conversion we will be visiting campus offices and classrooms to re-image computers with the Microsoft image. Re-imaging computers means erasing all current files on your local computer hard drive and re-writing the hard drive with new software.
* You will want to be certain that all of your files are stored on your network H:\ drive. Once a computer is re-imaged, we cannot restore files from the hard drive
The ITS department is excited about the possibilities opened up to our community by migrating to Microsoft - look for updates about some of these new capabilities in the next updates.
We realize that transition of this magnitude is disruptive and wish to do everything we can to help make this successful for you. If you have constructive ideas or suggestions on how we can improve our migration, please drop me a line and let me know.
Best,
John