Email Transition to Office 365

Project Status

Estimated project completion: see Projects

Executive Summary

McLennan Community College (MCC) will consolidate its separate email systems, Exchange 2019 for staff and Google Workspace for students, into a unified Microsoft Exchange Online (also referred to as Office 365 and Microsoft 365) environment. This transition supports MCC’s strategic goals to improve student communication, streamline processes, and invest in secure, modern campus infrastructure (2025-30 Strategic Plan, 2025).

The migration will enhance collaboration and strengthen security with multi-factor authentication (MFA), larger mailbox capacities, advanced spam and malware protection, and seamless calendar integration between Microsoft Outlook and Microsoft Teams. The project will be carried out in collaboration with college leadership and departmental stakeholders, with communication and training at its core. The estimated cost is $36,000.

Business Need & Background

Microsoft Exchange Server 2019, the last major on-premises release, will reach end of support on October 14, 2025. After this date, the college will no longer receive security updates, bug fixes, or technical support, leaving the platform vulnerable to security risks, compliance gaps, and potential system instability.

Currently, MCC operates staff email on Exchange 2019 and student email on Google Workspace (Gmail), creating two separate environments. This separation has caused communication friction, delays, and inconsistencies, making collaboration between students, faculty, and staff more challenging.

Higher education and enterprise IT have increasingly adopted cloud-based email solutions like Microsoft Exchange Online (part of Microsoft 365). Transitioning to a unified cloud platform eliminates the cost and complexity of maintaining on-premises servers while providing:

• Built-in redundancy and disaster recovery across Microsoft’s global datacenters;
• No scheduled downtime with automatic failover and high availability with a 99.9% monthly uptime SLA (Microsoft Corporation, 2025b);
• Continuous feature and security updates without disruptive migrations;
• Seamless integration with Microsoft 365 services such as Teams, OneDrive, and SharePoint; and,
• A single, unified environment that reduces communication friction and simplifies collaboration across all users

Project Description & Scope

This project builds on the progress made in the Domain Consolidation project completed earlier this year which established the near real-time synchronization of digital identities between MCC’s on-premises Active Directory and Microsoft 365 providing automatic cloud user account provisioning and deprovisioning.

The project will move MCC employee’s existing Exchange 2019 mailboxes to Exchange 365 and redirect MCC’s student email flow from Google’s Gmail service to Exchange 365. Employees will have access to all past emails in the new environment. Students will maintain access to Gmail to be able to access their old emails for 12 months, however all new email sent and received after the migration will only be available in Exchange 365.

Project Schedule (Original)

Project Management & Governance (Original)

• Email Transition to Office 365 Project Charter

Last updated: 10/22/2025