Urbana campus e-mail transition to illinois.edu under way

By Sharita Forrest, Assistant Editor
217-244-1072; slforres@illinois.edu

The UI’s Urbana campus has a new address. E-mail address, that is. Since May 13, students and faculty and staff members have been able to use NetID@illinois.edu e-mail addresses. As part of the branding initiative aimed at standardizing the Urbana campus’s identity as “Illinois,” the campus is transitioning to the www.illinois.edu Web domain. The first step in that process is establishing new addresses for Urbana campus e-mail users.

The new domain name and e-mail addresses are expected to be powerful branding tools, heightening recognition of the Illinois brand among key audiences, nationally and internationally, and broadening opportunities for education, research and public engagement, said Michele Raupp, project manager. 

“We recognize that this is a large change for this campus,” Raupp said. “We’re adding functionality, not taking anything away. There will be little impact to most users. But it should help faculty members, who rely on the image of the university, as well as students, who communicate with their friends at other universities, reinforce that they are from ‘Illinois,’ and that’s a cool thing because this is a great campus.”

E-mail sent to users’ current addresses at NetID@uiuc.edu will be forwarded automatically to their new addresses. Users are being encouraged to adopt the new address and use it on printed materials, in their e-mail signatures, in electronic mailing list subscriptions and anywhere else their e-mail addresses are used.

No changes are being made to users’ NetIDs or to their logins on the Bluestem and NESSIE systems.

Because changes do not yet affect departmental e-mail addresses such as NetID@business.uiuc.edu, project team members will be working with units that have their own departmental e-mail servers to update their mail server applications and the various e-mail clients that their faculty and staff members use. The project team’s goal is to have illinois.edu addresses implemented campuswide by the end of 2008.

The new e-mail addresses apply only to the Urbana campus, and will not affect the Chicago or Springfield campuses or system-level units such as university administration or affiliated agencies such as the Alumni Association and the UI Foundation.

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