Staff computer changes

Here are the tentative plans for big changes to all our staff computers as of the Middle Managers meeting on 11/6/08.

Breathe deeply…

Office 2007
* Send a Grover if you would like to have Office2007 pushed to your computer. It will not be sent unless you ask.
* Systems will soon push an Office2007 compatibility tool to all staff. This will enable folks to share documents successfully between Office2003 and Office2007 users.

Active Directory (AD) for staff
The Systems staff will be experimenting on themselves in early Nov, switching to campus Active Directory. They will measure how smoothly the process works, how long it takes to switch a user, and any problems they may encounter. Assuming their experiments are successful, the following is expected to happen:
* Dec. 1 (week) – Systems staff will switch each of our staff computers from the Smatherslib domain to the Campus AD domain.
* After a computer has had its domain switched, we will have a temporary 2-step process for logging in and accessing our email. First, we will log onto the computer with Gatorlink. Then, to open Outlook email, we will log in with our Smatherslib account.
* Dec. 5 (beginning) – Systems staff will visit our staff computers again to migrate our email to the Campus Exchange server. We will have to be present to log in during this activity. We hope to create a dept schedule: Systems will tell us when (days, hours) they plan to be in MSL, and we will coordinate times when each of is is at our computers and interruptible.

Prior to Dec 1-5:
* If you have messages in your Inbox or Sent box or Drafts box that are more than a year old, you will have to move those items into another folder prior to your planned visit from Systems to convert your email.
* Systems hopes to hold one or more training sessions for the new email, probably in 1A, before Thanksgiving. They may also post some step-by-step instructions on the Systems blog at http://blogs.uflib.ufl.edu/systems/.
Other details about Campus Exchange available at:
http://www.mail.ufl.edu/emailquestions.shtml
http://www.mail.ufl.edu/questionsandanswers.shtml
http://www.mail.ufl.edu/managemail.shtml

Fallout
* All permissions to access folders will be broken during the transition. We’re not sure of the impact on group emails such as Sciref and MSLcarrels, or on permission to upload web pages to the server. We may find ourselves sending a Grover each time we can’t open a folder and Systems will reassign permissions case-by-case, probably fairly quickly.

If Systems discovers they can't switch us successfully by mid-Dec, the whole process will be rescheduled for January or so. Stay tuned.