Guidelines and Policies affecting the decommissioning of institutional legacy email services

Guideline on Access to Email for University of Toronto Employees

Access to technology resources such as email is a privilege offered to University of Toronto employees based on their employment status. When an employee’s employment relationship with the University ends, they are no longer entitled to retain access to University of Toronto email services.

The granting, termination, and changing of utoronto.ca email access for employees occurs when Human Resources determines eligibility. Although ITS performs the technical actions for these processes, since these actions are driven by employment status, determinations about when they should occur will be informed by Human Resources.

See the complete Guideline for Email Accounts for University of Toronto Staff, Faculty and Librarians

Loss of Email Access Due to Account Abandonment

When an email account is abandoned by an individual, they are no longer considered eligible to use that account. An individual is deemed to have abandoned their account if they have not successfully logged into the account with their UTORid and password over a period of six months. Logging-in means successfully connecting to read messages or confirming that all messages are to be forwarded elsewhere.

Background

Reports

Over the period of the consultation for Student e-Communications, the group released four (4) reports based on their findings. The reports are referenced below, including the CIO’s response and the recommendations.

List of Reports and Recommendations:

• Report #1 – Student e-Communications (February 26, 2010)
• CIO’s Reponse to the Student e-Communications Report (February 26, 2010)
• Report #2 and Recommendations, Student e-Communications Services (Web) (May 12, 2010)
• Report #3 Student e-Communications Consultation w Appendices (September 15, 2010)
• Report # 3: Appendix 1 – Email Threat-Risk Assessment (September 15, 2010)
• Report # 3: Appendix 2 – Privacy Impact Assessment (September 15, 2010)
• Report # 3: Appendix 3- Student Survey Summary (September 15, 2010)
• Report #4 – Student e-Communications (February 7, 2011)
• Threat-Risk Assessment v 2.1 (Final)  (June 3, 2011)
• Privacy Impact Assessment v 3.1 (Final) (May 30, 2011)

Migration Event Review – May 2017

Executive Summary

Primary Objective

Migration of student and alumni accounts in Office 365 from US-based facilities to Canadian data centres with the establishment of a UofT tenant in Canada.

Expected Duration of the Outage

The migration commenced on Friday, 28 April at 6:00PM and was expected to conclude with services restored in the newly established Canadian tenant at 6:00PM Monday, 1 May.

Actual Duration of the Outage

UTmail+ was available again, less the backlog of email cached during the outage, by about 4:00AM, Thursday, 4 May.

Primary Cause

The number of accounts being migrated significantly affected the duration of the outage. Tenant-to-Tenant migrations between different data centre regions is a relatively new innovation from Microsoft and was only available to Canadian clients as of May 2016. Office 365 migrations are complex and require the synchronization of data across multiple interconnected services within Office 365. Sequence and timing are critical with the multiple interdependencies of the service components.

In the production environment, migration processes are subject to the competing resources within the tenant, the capacity forest, the layers of Office 365 and Azure Directory Services. Synchronization issues within Office 365 accounted for significant drag on the time to complete. The synchronization delay resulted in the inability to clear all remnants of the @mail and @alum references from the US tenant during the process – a necessity for breaking the connection with the US tenant prior to establishing accounts on the Canadian tenant.

Tenant size, movement between the US and Canadian-based data centres, and propagation and synchronization of data across multiple Office 365 components ultimately accounted for the extended time required to perform the migration.

Secondary Effects

Actions taken to speed the migration process included re-provisioning of licenses to some accounts that were apparently lacking following the return to operation. The licenses were eventually provisioned but were held up by the delays in data transfer and synchronization. Remediation prior to their provisioning led to secondary complications post-restoration. These complications these were all rectified in the following days.

Current State

Office 365 in the Canadian tenant is fully operational. Planning for the Faculty and Staff migration are underway. The few remaining migration clean-up issues are defined on the Known Issues page in the IT Service Centre.

Lessons Learned

• Plan for Greater Outage Duration — For a unique event such as this tenant-to-tenant migration, additional outage time should have been secured and promoted. Had the migration completed sooner there would have been a realized benefit, but additional mitigations might have been taken by individuals to work around the outage had they expected additional time without email.
• Expand Communications and Communicator Resources During Event – Because the event extended beyond the expected duration, a stated update schedule, e.g., “Updates will occur every 2 hours until event conclusion” would have provided additional assurance to students and some level of certainty as to when the next update would occur.
• Timing and Alternatives – There was speculation/conversation about the timing of the outage. Internally, the project team and leadership recognized that this was the optimal window to perform the migration, but this was not fully shared with the affected communities. More communication about the rationale behind the migration and its timing would have alleviated some concerns.

---

O365 Tenant Migration to Canada Issues Status
Issue	Description	Status and Action
Missing Folders in Office 365	Reports that mail copied to some folders in inboxes is incomplete.	Resolved.
Inbound Messages Rejected	Some messages are looping in the delivery cycle. This is related to the licensing problem reported.	Resolved.
SPAM Mail	Some user are reporting issues with spam mail.	Resolved.
Office ProPlus desktop apps cannot be downloaded	Link is not available to eligible UTmail+ clients	Resolved.
Error Message when logging in	A number of users were reporting a Microsoft license error message:”X-OWA-Error: Microsoft.Exchange.Clients.Owa2.Server.Core. OwaUserHasNoMailboxAndNoLicenseAssignedException	Resolved.
Forwarding Messages from Office 365 Account	Users forwarding their Office 365 accounts were not seeing messages.	Resolved. Some forwarding settings were not populated properly. Log into your Office 365 account at mail.utoronto.ca to re-enter the forwarding options. See the instructions on setting up forwarding.
No Access to UTmail+ Archive	Users would like to know when they can access their old UTmail+ account contents.	Resolved: This feature has been enabled and is available to all users. See the instructions on how to access the UTmail+ Archive.
Inbox Rules Not Transferred	User settings for inbox rules were not carried over.	Resolved: Users need to recreate their inbox rules. Instructions on creating rules are on the Help Desk Knowledge Base.
External Mail Delivery to Alumni Domain	Reported issues with @alum.utoronto.ca accounts not receiving external email.	Resolved.
Rich Client Access to UTmail+	Rich Clients (Outlook,iPhone, MacMail etc.) were unable to connect to mailboxes in Office 365.	Resolved: Timing issue for DNS changes to propagate to services through the web.