Migration to
Microsoft Outlook
By
Henry Wong
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Eudora has been staff's standard email client software since the 1990s.
Due to its weak security features and the lack of multi-language features, it is
no longer a suitable email client tool for most of our users. The Computing
Services Centre (CSC) has been providing support to both Microsoft Outlook
Express and Outlook as alternative email tools for several years with the aim of
eventually phasing out Eudora. With the current Outlook version getting more
mature and powerful, the CSC decides now is the right time to adopt Outlook as
staff’s standard email client software.
MS Outlook has many features that
Eudora lacks. The following are some key features:
As MS Office supports editing and viewing of documents in more than 80
languages by taking advantage of the Unicode text encoding standard, this
means that when you're in MS Outlook, you can easily read or send messages
in many different languages.
The Junk E-mail Filter is designed to work
with other Outlook 2003 features to help prevent many of the
unwanted e-mail messages that you receive every day. It uses
state-of-the-art technology developed by Microsoft Research
to evaluate whether a message should be treated as junk
e-mail. Any message that is caught by the filter is moved to
a special Junk E-mail folder, where you can retrieve or
review at a later time if so desired.
The calendar and scheduling components of Outlook are fully integrated
with its e-mail, contacts, and other features. You can view them in a day,
week, or month at once. With Calendar you can create appointments and events
just as you would write in a paper-based organizer, and then send meeting
request via email to all attendees, and create reminders to yourself for the
meetings/events.
When integrating with Microsoft Exchange Server, you can have more
powerful calendar and scheduling functions such as calendar sharing and
making group scheduling.
A task is a personal or work-related errand you want to track through
completion. A task can occur once or repeatedly (a recurring task). A
recurring task can be repeated at regular intervals or repeated based on the
date you mark the task complete. In Outlook you can create tasks list to
track through the completion of your specified tasks and automatically
remind you when they are due.
It is the electronic equivalent of paper sticky notes. Use notes to jot
down questions, ideas, reminders, and anything you would write on note
paper. You can leave notes open on the screen while you work. This is
especially convenient when you're using notes for storing bits of
information you may need later, such as directions or text you want to reuse
in other items or documents.
You can synchronize e-mail messages, calendar items, contacts, notes, and
tasks between Outlook running on your desktop PC and your mobile devices
such as Pocket PC or PDA.
The Microsoft Exchange server provides a highly reliable, scalable, and
unified messaging and collaboration infrastructure. MS Outlook is its client
counterpart. Together they provide many new and enhanced features such as
Shared Calendar, Group Tasks list, Public Folder, Global Address list, Group
scheduling, etc. Setting up of Exchange server will be one of the "Future
Enhancements to the CityU’s Email Infrastructure (Ref: Network Computing
Issue 50 - December 2006)".
The massive rollout of the MS Outlook will take place some time in the summer
term of this year. When this is formally released, the CSC will provide on-site
support to users on MS Outlook setup and one-off migration of users’ local
mailboxes from Eudora to Outlook. The migration will be arranged on a
departmental basis within a scheduled period. The whole process will be expected
to complete before the end of year 2008, and no more support service on the use
of Eudora will be offered by the CSC once the whole migration exercise is
completed.
Staff members are encouraged to switch to using MS Outlook as soon as
possible. In order to enable staff to get familiar with Outlook, training
courses will be scheduled frequently throughout the year. At this stage, the CSC
has already started to provide standard support service on the use of MS Outlook
through its Help Desk. Staff can seek help from them when needed.