Move to Exchange Calendar Services
Exchange calendar offers real improvements over SMU’s existing service, including: Unfortunately, the move from our existing calendar service to Exchange will not be a seamless transition. Despite continued effort and work with three leading conversion companies, we’ve been unable to accurately convert calendar data from the existing calendar. Rather than delay this any longer, the University has decided to take a "start fresh" approach. Starting on December 14, Saint Mary’s will switch to using the Exchange calendar as the University calendar. It is accessible to you through Outlook at your desktop, or through the existing Exchange mail interface in SMUport. Please use the Exchange calendar to book any meetings that occur from December 14 onward. Any meetings prior to December 14 will still be booked in the old SMUport calendar. In other words, there will be a short transitional period when we will be using two different calendars. In addition, any meeting already in the SMUport calendar for December 14 or later will need to be recreated in the Exchange calendar. Only the meeting organizer should recreate these meetings, to avoid attendees creating conflicting events. We encourage everyone to enter existing meetings and appointments after December 14 into Exchange as quickly as possible to improve the Scheduling Assistant accuracy. Meeting rooms that are currently available to book through the SMUport calendar will also be available through Exchange. If you look after one of those room resources now, ITSS will be in touch with you this week to help you make the switch to Exchange. Your old calendar data will remain available in SMUport in read-only mode, for reference, printing or to create a historical record until March 1, 2012. We know that some departments need to maintain a historical record of appointments for legal reasons. If you would like assistance in creating this, please notify the ITSS Helpdesk. We realize that this transition can be challenging, but please bear with it. The features built into Exchange are things many people have been asking for. The long term benefits will far outweigh our short term transitional difficulties. Need more information? Microsoft has some excellent online support resources for the Office products. To get you started, here are some links to information about Outlook Calendar: Video training: Online courses: Get familiar with the Outlook Calendar (Practice requires Outlook 2010) Calendar I: Outlook calendar basics (Practice requires Outlook 2007) Calendar II: See and use multiple calendars (Practice requires Outlook 2007) Delegate Access: Let someone else mind your calendar (Practice requires Outlook 2007) How-To Articles: