What

During February 2010, we need to apply some important updates to the University email (Microsoft Exchange) service.

The design of our email service allows us to carry out this relatively major work with a minimum of disruption to customers during the working day.

There will however be three dates on which there will be some short periods of disruption during the working day.

When

On each of these dates, there will be a momentary interruption to the Exchange service for approximately one third of our users at the times specified.

We are carrying out this work during the working day because of the amount of time needed to perform it and because we want to ensure if we encounter issues we can escalate them to Microsoft support as quickly as possible. This is essential to help us minimise the risks of installing the updates.

What do I need to do?

If you are using Microsoft Outlook, you may notice it reports it has lost connection to the service - once the disruption has ended it will automatically reconnect.

If you are using other forms of access (Outlook Web Access, IMAP) then we would recommend you avoid using them for the short periods indicated above so as not to risk losing any work.

The disruption will only affect you on one of the dates above. It is not possible to easily explain which date will affect particular users - but if you are affected on the first day then you will not experience any disruption on the second or third days, etc.

Why

We need to do this work to ensure we keep the University's email services in a secure, patched and supported configuration; to allow us to continue to provide reliable email services to our customers.

I have further questions, what should I do?

Please contact the IT Service Desk on (0116) 252 2253 (extension 2253 internally) or by email to ithelp@le.ac.uk.