UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Penn State has extended its Box contract for six months to complete the migration of the remaining files to Microsoft Office 365 by March 31. Those files are primarily in bulk and nonstandard accounts, which are more complex and require additional time to migrate.
"The Box project team appreciates the collaboration we have had from the units and individual account holders across the University throughout this project," said Jen Stedelin, associate vice president for Enterprise Systems and Services. "Thanks to these partnerships, we have migrated files from more than 93% of our Box accounts to date."
The Box retirement project directly supports One Penn State 2025 Guiding Principle 5: Achieve the Highest Level of Efficient Use of University Resources, Stedelin said. Utilizing Office 365’s robust suite of productivity and collaboration tools to the fullest reduces duplication of services and saves resources.
Students, faculty and staff seeking to learn more about those tools, particularly OneDrive, SharePoint and Teams, are encouraged to attend an upcoming 90-minute training session. In collaboration with Learning Tree International, IT Learning and Development is offering 20 sessions from mid-October through January. To register, visit the Learning Resource Network.
The advisory committee of faculty members and IT leaders from the campuses and colleges has played a critical role in the project by elevating concerns to the team for consideration and resolution. Robert D. Hume, Evan Pugh University Professor and an advisory committee member, called the project a model for how similar work should be handled.
"I think faculty concerns have been paramount throughout, and a great deal of care has been taken to address concerns and supply clear explanations for all questions," Hume said. "Any time I have made a suggestion, it has been welcomed and followed up on. I think the transition team has done an admirable job of addressing difficult cases. For a huge majority of faculty users, the transition has been made easy and no big deal."
The first unit to completely migrate all files from Box was the Office of Physical Plant. William Sitzabee, vice president of facilities management and planning and chief facilities officer, said OPP retired 600 Box accounts containing 10 terabytes of data.
“The retirement project went smoothly for OPP, as we deployed a dedicated team to research, confirm and clean Box data for all nine of our internal divisions," Sitzabee said. "The project team did an outstanding job announcing the impact to end-users, providing employee training and appropriate resources for data management, and keeping leadership abreast of issues as they arose."
The project team is working closely with other units to close out their project activities this fall.
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