From July to September, students and faculty had issues with their email due to the migration from emails from their local college to a statewide email system. The reason behind this issue has nothing to do with the IT staff at Winona, but the company the state hired to migrate these emails.

“When we merged with the Minnesota State system, we no longer had control of the email,” Associate Vice President for Academic Affairs and Chief Information Officer, Kenneth Janz said. “Winona was just an innocent bystander waiting for them to finish the migration.”

The problem lies mostly with anyone who attended Winona before this year, as their old email and calendar items didn’t transfer into their new emails. The company hired for these transfers made several mistakes over a six-week period as they tried to work out this problem.

Eventually their solution caused students to receive duplicates or triplicates of an email originally sent once. The company tried to delete some of these emails until they eventually called in to the university and said they would stop.

The whole process may have caused difficulties, but the reason behind the migration was meant to make students’ lives easier. Those who could benefit from the transfer are Transfer, Post-Secondary Enrollment Option (PSEO), online or College In Schools (CIS) students who got a Winona State email along with the email they had from their previous college.

These students struggled as they had two or more emails to manage. The Minnesota State System decided to merge all the emails into a statewide tenant. Minnesota State merged each Minn State school’s emails so there was only one email for transfer, PSEO, online or CIS students.

After the migration started, Winona State was the 21st university to join. The latest update on the migration claimed there were 27 college and universities who also migrated to this system. Eventually, all 37 universities within the Minnesota State System will migrate to this single email system.

Despite this affecting everyone, any issues with faculty were resolved quickly.

“We pulled some magic for the faculty, but it primarily affected students,” Janz said.

Since the company left the migration alone, the help desk offered to help anyone who still had issues, but only 27 students reported.

For a problem affecting the whole college, the number should have increased, but there are reasons for people to not call in.

“I had a student who worked for the help desk who had issues with his old email, but he didn’t ask for help because he didn’t care. It was an old email anyway,” Janz said.

Briana Ackerman, a freshman nursing major, also sees no need to fix her email issues either.

According to her, she still uses her email from St. Cloud Technical Community College after having a CIS class in high school. She says that she is still able to send and receive emails without a problem.

“I actually checked into the help desk my second week of coming here and they told me my email would change over time, but it hasn’t,” Ackerman said. “It really doesn’t make a difference to me though, because you’ll get by no matter what.”

A lot of old emails still exist, but Tech Support plans to take them down over winter break to clean up the leftover mess once and for all.