X
Tech

UNSW does Microsoft Exchange deal

The University of NSW has decided to ditch its old UniMail system for its tens of thousands of students, moving ahead with an implementation of a new Exchanged-based system hosted by Microsoft in the US.
Written by Suzanne Tindal, Contributor

The University of NSW has decided to ditch its old UniMail system for its tens of thousands of students, moving ahead with an implementation of a new Exchanged-based system hosted by Microsoft in the US.

zmailgetpassword.jpg

First step in moving onto zMail
(Credit: Suzanne Tindal/ZDNet.com.au)

Maths Summer School students have already begun to be moved onto the new system, which the university has dubbed zMail. It won't be until January and February however, that the broader university community, including undergraduate students, postgraduate coursework students and alumni, will get to use the new platform. UNSW has more than 30,000 students in total.

The accounts, which students can continue using after they leave the university, will have a storage capacity of 10GB and will enable 10MB file transfers. In contrast, the UniMail accounts only held up to 20MB.

The service will be managed by UNSW but hosted by Microsoft at the Live@edu Exchange Labs site in the US.

UNSW's Microsoft deal follows the University of Queensland's decision to move to a Microsoft Live@edu system for its 38,000 students. A spate of universities had before that moved onto the Gmail equivalent, such as New Zealand's largest tertiary institution, the University of Auckland, and Australia's Macquarie University.

Macquarie University, however had decided not to move staff onto the hosted email because of the data transfer costs the university would incur for all the data having to be transferred to and from the US.

University representatives declined to comment on the issue. The university's IT operation is led by IT director Michael Kirby-Lewis.

Editorial standards