Over winter break student and non-benefited staff e-mail was migrated from on-campus servers to the Microsoft Cloud-based solution, Office 365.
The migration has caused students and some faculty to log into their Outlook e-mail once or twice after signing in to WyoWeb.
With the old e-mail system, used before winter break and in past years, a single sign-on setting was enabled so that once users logged into WyoWeb and clicked on the e-mail icon, they would go right into UW e-mail systems.
With the new system in the UW cloud, there is not a single sign-on option from WyoWeb to Office 365, and it requires users to enter their login information again.
“If a student sits down at a UW Student Lab computer, it would require them to log into the lab system, so that’s one login. If the student still uses WyoWeb to get to their e-mail, they would have to login to WyoWeb, and then login to their Office 365 e-mail,” Maggie Morrison, Director of Client Support Services for Information Technology, said. “That constitutes three logins. However, students don’t have to use WyoWeb to get to their e-mail on Office 365.”
Students can go straight to http://uwmail.uwyo.edu directly in their browser and log in once to their e-mail, bypassing WyoWeb altogether, according to Morrison. Students may also set up their e-mail directly in the Outlook on their computers or on their smartphone devices.
The reason behind the change was to increase e-mail resources while at the same time reducing the cost to the university. By moving to Office 365, the university is removing the need to purchase and maintain e-mail servers on-site. In addition to the cost savings, the e-mail quota has expanded from 500 MBs to 25 GBs.
Based on Morrison’s statement, this is not a temporary change.
“The change is permanent and additional features such as SharePoint personal sites, web applications and collaboration tools will be provided at a later date. Faculty and benefitted staff e-mail may also be migrated to Office 365 in the future,” Morrison said.
In the future, if faculty and staff are migrated to the Office 365, WyoWeb may once again have a single sign-on scenario.
