OIT News

NC State to transition to Google Vault email retention service

By Office of Information Technology

During the past year, Google has been transitioning its customers from Postini to Google Vault, which allows retention of emails for eDiscovery and compliance. NC State is slated to begin its transition in the next 60 days.

Vault will provide email retention for all users of Google Apps @ NC State, not just those in specific employee classifications. Vault will make it easier for all campus users to comply with the North Carolina Public Records Act (N.C.G.S. 132-1), which requires state employees to maintain copies of all work-related records, including emails.

OIT anticipates beginning the move to Vault in February and will provide campus with the latest progress updates by various means, including OIT News, SysNews and the Centeral Email Archiving and Retention Services Web page.

This transition to Vault will require several short periods of significant disruption for backend updates and code revisions in the mail infrastructure. However, this should not impact campus users’ ability to send and receive mail normally.

As part of the migration, OIT will need to take the Mail Manager tool offline. During that period, email aliases will continue to work, but none can be created, edited or deleted. The Mail Manager tool manages these aliases:

  • Departmental Aliases; e.g., graduate_secretary@ncsu.edu –> jmcarter@ncsu.edu
  • Departmental Forwards; e.g., ced_ipad_setup@ncsu.edu –> ced_support@ncsu.edu
  • Hosted Aliases; e.g., rqu@cropsci.ncsu.edu –> rqu@ncsu.edu
  • Personal Aliases; e.g., firstname_lastname@ncsu.edu –> unityid@ncsu.edu

OIT’s goal is to provide campus with at least a two-day advance notice of all planned backend disruptions.

What you should do now

  • Be sure to check your current aliases and make any needed changes or deletions now. Don’t be caught by surprise when the Mail Manager tool goes offline.
  • If you are still using an IMAP client (e.g., Thunderbird, Outlook):
    • Consider using the Gmail Web client.
    • Make sure you are using smtp.gmail.com (NOT smtp.ncsu.edu) for your outgoing mail.

The transition to Vault should be relatively seamless for campus email users. Direct any questions to help@ncsu.edu.