Monthly Archives: May 2022

BCTC has developed and tested the strategy for resolving the remaining email and calendar transition issues and will be deploying it to administrative offices over the coming days.

The steps include building a new Outlook profile that only talks to Microsoft 365 and making the baruch.cuny.edu address primary there. We are also simplifying access to shared mailboxes.

We are working to deploy this solution as quickly as possible to all administrative offices; we will be coordinating with divisional vice presidents to schedule on a per-office basis (as defined by the VPs and relevant managers). We need all staff in an office to be available in person or remotely accessing their office computer when the transition is made. Even though most of the changes will be deployed automatically, we will be available via Zoom during an office’s cutover to ensure that users can log in and access email, as well as configure access to any shared mailboxes.

If you have not been able to migrate your email to the new system, you will be instructed to access it through webmail at https://mymail.baruch.cuny.edu/ for the time being. We are nearing the ability to complete migrating maliboxes in an automated fashion in the background, a process that may take several weeks but will happen with no additional user intervention.

Summary: Emails sent through May 2nd are safe and always available through the Mymail web interface at https://mymail.baruch.cuny.edu/.  New mail is always available at https://outlook.office.com/. We will be changing the primary address for all accounts to baruch.cuny.edu soon, which should remedy most of  the issues described below. In the meantime, the Outlook web interface is a consistently reliable way to access old and new email if the Outlook clients are causing issues.

Priority = Faculty Email Support: We know the next two weeks are critical for faculty to send and receive email to and from students; to that end we want to recommend that Microsoft 365 mail accounts are always available on the web at https://outlook.office.com.  The web version is not only a fallback option for sending and receiving email, in many instances it can be your primary method for sending and receiving email on- or off-campus.  The Microsoft 365 Outlook web interface is much more fully-featured than our old Mymail system.  Also keep in mind that the old Outlook Web Access is still fully available for referring to any old email, calendars and contacts you might need to access at https://mymail.baruch.cuny.edu/. The links to the old and new accounts are posted on the Quick Links menu on the College’s web site. 

Changing primary email address in Microsoft 365 to Baruch.cuny.edu: Currently, may email addresses are displaying in the CUNY login format: firstname.lastname## @ login.cuny.baruch.edu. Please be assured that this only temporary and your email address has not changed. Your email address is still firstname.lastname @ Baruch.cuny.edu. The temporary setting of the Microsoft 365 email address away from Baruch.cuny.edu was done to allow both accounts to be visible in a single instance of Outlook for Windows.  However, it is causing other issues with sending and receiving email.  We will be setting all accounts email addresses in M365 to @baruch.cuny.edu shortly after the end of the semester.  You can also ask to have your address changed to @baruch.cuny.edu sooner if you have no need to access the old and new servers in Outlook for Windows in the same profile.  Changing the default mail address to @baruch.cuny.edu will necessitate making the Outlook for Windows profiles only use the Microsoft 365 account.  We are working on a process to do that for users automatically and will support users directly as necessary.

Old emails, calendars and contacts: Changing the default email address in the cloud to baruch.cuny.edu will change how you can access old email on the old server. We will be working with users and offices who may still need to have old email (and calendars and contacts) available in Microsoft 365 and will be providing guidance on migration of email later this summer. Access to old email that has not yet been migrated will be through https://mymail.baruch.cuny.edu/ for the time being. We are encouraging users to only connect their devices with the Outlook client and mobile apps only to the Microsoft 365 environment and if they have not migrated their email to use Mymail to search mail when needed at this time.

Resource Mailboxes:  Resource mailboxes, which are shared mailboxes used by administrative offices of the College, cannot receive mail from senders outside of the CUNY M365 environment when the @login.cuny.edu address is used. We must change the addresses associated with all resource accounts to the baruch.cuny.edu address as soon as possible. We will be providing guidance to users regarding this change in the next few days.

Resource mailbox users have noticed that the message folders show up automatically in their M365 profiles on Outlook for Windows, but they cannot send messages the same way as before—notably the messages do not show up in the “Sent” folder of the resource accounts.  Adding the resource account as a separate email address in the profile does work, but will cause duplicate folders to appear in your folder list.  We are investigating removing the auto-mapping of resource accounts and relying on adding the email addresses manually moving forward.  There are also complications if you have not moved the resource accounts and users of them to having their Baruch address as primary in M365.  Again, in all cases opening the mailbox in Outlook 365 Web allows you to use the boxes until the client configuration is finalized.

Calendar Migration: We are aware that meetings (calendar items with multiple attendees) migrated to M365 are not properly updating for all participants when the meeting organizer makes a change to the meeting. We are investigating the cause with CUNY and Microsoft, but it is likely that these issues will be resolved when we set the primary email address in M365 to baruch.cuny.edu. In some instances, a user may need to create a new calendar item in the M365 calendar for a meeting that needs to be changed and instruct the other invited participant(s) to remove the old event from the calendar manually.  We expect to understand more about this in the coming days.

Additional technical background:  The bulk of the challenges we are seeing with email at this point are around the Windows Outlook configuration.  The challenge is that the baruch.cuny.edu address exists both on our local server and on the Microsoft 365 CUNY tenant.  Different versions of Outlook try to find things first on Microsoft 365 (including Outlook 2019 and later) and make it challenging to access the old server and new system at the same time, or even to access the old server at all with the Windows Outlook Client.  

We are having other issues with some @login.cuny.edu user mailboxes not being able to receive messages from outside of the CUNY tenant, which are basically off-campus addresses.  This is the documented behavior for resource mailboxes (which is why we’re changing them back very soon) but for users is because of a configuration error that CUNY will fix for us.

We are still seeing other miscellaneous issues around delegation and rights assignments, especially to distribution lists and shared mailboxes.  We are working with CUNY to devise the best methods for moving forward.

We are continuing to address the issues related to the M365 email cutover. If you are experiencing problems accessing your email on your Baruch-issued device, please follow the instructions that explain how to remove and add your Outlook account in the video below.

If you are still experiencing problems with your email after following the instructions in this video, please email the helpdesk with Outlook Registry Key Needed in the subject.

May 4th email status update

The cutover to M365 email occurred yesterday. Email messages are now arriving in users’ M365 accounts. Outgoing messages are also being sent via the M365 service, rather than our on-premises server. However, there are changes to our migration plan due to issues discovered in the final stages of the transition. We will describe these changes below.

Outlook on Windows Devices

We had numerous issues with Outlook on Windows where the old and new email accounts were not appearing in the same profile as it was before the cutover. In addition, users are experiencing other issues, such as pop-up windows requesting an account login. Working with CUNY Central and Microsoft Support we determined that there was due to the on-premises and cloud servers having the same primary email address. To regain the previous functionality, we restored the configuration on the cloud server so that the firstname.lastnameXX@login.cuny.edu address is the primary one affiliated with your M365 mailbox. M365 is still fully functional with the firstname.lastname@baruch.cuny.edu address, and all mail addressed to @baruch.cuny.edu email addresses is only going to the M365 mailboxes. You must access the M365 mailbox to receive your email. While some email may go out with the @login.cuny.edu address, that should not affect your ability to receive email to your @baruch.cuny.edu address. You do not need to share your @login.cuny.edu email address. If you wish to not have your @login.cuny.edu address go out to people we can change your primary email in M365 back to @baruch.cuny.edu, but you will no longer be able to have both accounts in the same Outlook profile. You can have them in different profiles or use mymail.baruch.cuny.edu for access to your old email. If you have take the time to put the old email you need in the M365 system you can likely disconnect from the old server and we can make your @baruch.cuny.edu address primary which will resolve issues. You can also use the Outlook web client to send email as @baruch.cuny.edu from your M365 account (but it must be selected manually unless it is your primary address)

This configuration change will restore the behavior of both mailboxes being visible at the same time in Outlook. We are finding that many computers need to have a new profile created to use the accounts properly at this point. We are deploying staff as quickly as possible to help users who need assistance as well as providing a special chat room to help people individually if possible.

This change away from the baruch.cuny.edu email being primary in the cloud is a temporary change that we will be changing back in the near future. In fact, once you have either migrated your email to M365 or decided to not migrate your mail we can change your primary email in M365 back to baruch.cuny.edu and will instruct you to remove the on-campus baruch.cuny.edu email server from all your devices. It is important you work to either migrate your email or use Webmail only for referring to email as soon as possible.

Outlook for Mac, Apple Mail for iOS, and Outlook App for iOS and Android

Users who have configured their mail reader for the new M365 account on iOS devices can access their legacy and new mail from an integrated display as we planned. This includes users of Outlook for Mac. While we were seeing some issues of slowness to the on-campus server from mobile devices, these are ameliorated by no new mail coming to the client.

Webmail

There are 2 separate login processes to retrieve M365 email and the legacy Baruch email. The “Quick Links” drop down menu on the College’s web site lists them separately under “Faculty/Staff” as:

Email (starting May 3, 2022) — This uses CUNY Login
Email (thru May 2, 2022) – This uses Baruch username

If you are having client issues Webmail is a safe way to access your email and should always present the correct mailbox.

Resource mailboxes

For most users their resource accounts assigned to them are appearing in the Windows Outlook client automatically. To access a Resource Account mailbox, go to the upper right corner of the M365 Webmail window and click on your name. Select “Open another mailbox”. When the entry form pops up type the name of the Resource Account and press “Open” (it will search if you don’t know the exact name.) If more than one choice appears, select the appropriate Resource Account.

To manually add the resource mailbox to Outlook for Windows, you will go to File/Account Settings/Account Settings, and select “new” in the box. You will need the @login.cuny.edu name of the resource mailbox which we will be distributing to authorized users. You may need to re-enter your CUNY Login credentials and restart Outlook but your mailbox will appear. The @baruch.cuny.edu address of the mailbox will work fully for sending and receiving emails just like user mailboxes, but sometimes the @login.cuny.edu address might be visible.