University IT to move Zimbra email, calendar accounts to Office 365

The University’s IT Services will migrate all Stanford email and calendar accounts currently hosted on Zimbra to Office 365 during the summer. The email and calendar services of most faculty and staff, currently hosted through the Zimbra Collaboration Suite, will switch to Microsoft Exchange servers as part of this shift. Current Gmail users, including undergraduates, Law School students and Graduate School of Business students, will not be affected.

According to Jonathan Pilat, senior director of University IT, the decision to move from Zimbra to Office 365 was due to the more standard enterprise calendar and hybrid configuration options of Microsoft Exchange.

Additionally, Microsoft has made agreements with Stanford Hospital and Clinics and the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital to specially protect health data in the cloud.

“Google has such an agreement with the University, but not the hospitals,” Pilat said in an email to The Daily. “This limits the kinds of information we can store at Google.”

The same authentication and security technologies currently in place for Google email and calendar services will be applied to the accounts on Microsoft.

According to Pilat, there will be no significant downtime when the switch from Zimbra to Office 365 occurs over the summer. Individual accounts, however, may be briefly inaccessible during the switch.

Contact Victor Xu at vxu ‘at’ stanford.edu.