Email and Calendaring

Service Description

The service provides an integrated mailbox that allows sharing and collaboration from on and off campus. This allows members of the University to communicate with each other and external collaborators.

Features

  • Provision of a University email address and mailbox
    • Staff and Postgraduate Research student mailboxes are stored on on-premises Exchange servers
    • Undergraduate and Postgraduate Taught student mailboxes are hosted by Microsoft Office365.
  • On site and remote access (Outlook email client, OWA web client, ActiveSync mobile device client)
  • Ability to share mailbox items and collaborate with others
  • Resilient design to ensure high availability
  • Exchange’s Recover Deleted Items functionality allows users to restore mail deleted within 14 days themselves
  • All mail to/from the University network is routed through the managed mail systems where controls for malware, phishing and spam are applied
  • Most spam is filtered out (with a degree of customer control)

Users

Available to all members of the University

Service Hours

24 x 7 x 365

The ISS “at risk” period is 07:00-09:00 every Tuesday. Further planned maintenance times will be publicised in advance if there will be a disruption to the service.

Due to size and complexity of the infrastructure, monthly maintenance usually takes place on a Sunday morning.

Level of Service

On premises mailboxes are backed up nightly for disaster recovery purposes only. ISS will not restore data from backups for any other reason. Exchange’s Recover Deleted Items functionality allows users to restore mail deleted within 14 days themselves.

Staff and postgraduate research students have the ability to use the full Outlook client, whereas undergraduate and postgraduate taught students are limited to Outlook Web Access and ActiveSync on mobile devices.

Staff and postgraduate research students can request IMAP access to the mail store with the support of their unit’s IT support team. However this will only give limited functionality (no access to calendars).

Other mail clients may work but support for them is limited.

Support and Documentation

Documentation, including a Staff User Guide, is available at: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/itservice/software/email.

Additional support is available via the ISS Service Desk on 5999 or it.servicedesk@ncl.ac.uk.

All incidents relating to this service will be handled according to the ISS Incident Management and Major Incident Management processes.

Request Process

Provisioning: Members of the University are automatically provided with a University mailbox when they register for an IT account. The email address is constructed based on name information from the official HR or student record.

University email addresses will be searchable:

  • In the Global Address List within Exchange for internal users
  • In the University’s web based People Search directory (http://directory.ncl.ac.uk/) for internal and external users

Increase in quota: Members of the University can request an increase in quota by contacting the IT Service Desk.

Spam filtering control:

  1. Change the handling of spam using the web interface at https://crypt.ncl.ac.uk/spam/spamlevel.cgi. More information on this can be found at http://www.ncl.ac.uk/itservice/email/general/spamandphishing.
  2. Request exceptions to handling of mail from specific external addresses ordomains by contacting the IT Service Desk

Email address changes:

  • To request a change in the allocated email address, contact the ISS IT Service Desk in the first case. In general, changes will only be made based on HR or student record data but the ISS IT Service Desk can advise on this.
  • The ISS IT Service Desk is automatically informed of surname changes. They will contact the user involved and ask if email address should be changed to match the new name (old address will be retained, forwarding to new address).

User Responsibility

It is the user’s responsibility to ensure that they follow the ISS rules of use: http://www.ncl.ac.uk/itservice/rules.

Users are encouraged to actively housekeep their mailbox.

Costs

N/A