It's time to say goodbye to sjamail.net and hello to sjabr.org. Next school year, all students will be moving from Google Apps to Office 365; with that change will come a new email address. At the start of the 2013-2014 school year, students, faculty and staff will all have sjabr.org email accounts. For students, that means your email address will look similar to this: 38888@sjabr.org and will use your SJA network password. Your old sjamail.net accounts will remain active for three months after the start of the school year. This means you will still have access to all of your email, files, contacts, calendars, etc. It is expected that during this time, you will migrate any information that you want to keep to your new sjabr.org account. You will be provided with the tools and instructions to accomplish this. For instance, on next year's image, there will be a utility for you to use to migrate all your emails quickly and easily. 

At the start of the year, you will need to create a forwarding address in Gmail that will forward your email to your new address during the three-month co-existence. This will stay active until the accounts are closed at the three-month deadline. After that, your old sjamail.net address will be added as an alias, and any mail destined for that address will wind up in your 365 email account. However, you will not be able to send from that address. Your primary address will remain sjabr.org. 

Google provided us with a great service for approximately five years, but we feel that the Office 365 suite will offer even greater functionality. Like Google Drive, every student will receive a cloud storage account (aka SkyDrive) with 7GB of storage available (40 percent more than Google Drive). You will also get a desktop synchronization utility that operates in much the same way Google Drive did. The primary difference is that SkyDrive will be syncing to a service called SharePoint, which will enable you to share and collaborate on documents either from the web or directly from your MS Office desktop applications. In addition, everyone will have access to Lync, which is an instant messaging/video conferencing/collaboration application. It's like Skype but with a lot more built-in features.

 We will post more updates as information becomes available. Google will be missed, but Office 365 looks promising.

As everyone knows we have recently moved from an on-premise exchange server to Office 365 for our email provider.  All users have now been successfully migrated and I will begin the second phase of this deployment over the Mardi Gras holidays.  

 
Currently all mail still flows through our on-premise Exchange server as well as our spam filter.  This was necessary during the migration to be sure that no matter where a particular mailbox was during the migration that mail would be routed to the correct service (365 vs on-premise).  
 

What does this mean for you?    ​

If all goes well the only thing you will notice is you will no longer recieve spam summary reports from our current spam filter but instead from Microsoft Forefront Online Protection for Exchange (FOPE).  You will interact with FOPE in much the same way you currently do.  You will recive a notification email once a day about your spam history where you can allow email through and whitelist.  There is also a website (https://quarantine.messaging.microsoft.com) where you can log in to see your full spam history (15 days max) where you can also whitelist miscategorized emails and recover emails from quarantine.

EDIT:  You will recieve a notification every three days.

 
For a more indepth look at FOPE and how it relates to you please see the short video below:

I know some have been confused about setting up their new email account on their phones.

Here is what it should look like.  Remeber to use your email account for the username.

*If it doesn't work try turning off your wireless.

To remove emails over 35MB in order to complete the migration to Office 365 you will need to use outlook to search your email and permanent remove the email from two places.

First select the search box on the top of outlook which will then activate the Search tab on the ribbon.

Select search tools from the ribbon menu

Then select Advanced Find...

This will open the following window:

1. Select the More Choices tab
2. Select the Browse button and select all the folders which store mail items
3. Select greater than from the drop down
4. Enter 35000 in the first size button

Select Find Now and allow the program to search.  This will find all the email items and display them below.  Once finished assess whether the emails need to be backed up and do so.  Once backups are done highlight all the emails then press and hold shift followed by pressing delete.  This will delete all the emails without also moving them to the deleted items folder.

You still need to remove the emails from one more place to be finished.  Select "Folder" from the ribbon menu in Outlook. 

Then select "Recover Deleted Items".  This opens a window with all your recently deleted items.  Find and remove all the emails your previously removed.

All done!

Even though Gmail has a pretty generous attachment size limit I can bet that there has been times where you have needed more than 25mb.  Luckily, Google has now integrated Drive and Gmail so you can send files stored in Google Drive as an attachment.  This allows email attachments to be sent that are up to 10 GB in size.  Everything can be done directly in Gmail and it will handle all the necessary sharing permissions for Drive.

This new feature is being rolled out over the next few days so if you don't have it yet be patient and you will soon see a google drive icon in the new compose window.