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Hermes migration for current staff and students

Students and staff from institutions participating in the University of Cambridge's Microsoft EES agreement can migrate their personal Hermes email accounts to Exchange Online.

Factors to consider before migrating

    • Please consult your College or Institution's support policy and advice before migrating. UIS is currently working with institutions to plan and schedule automated institution-wide migrations from Hermes to Exchange Online where they have requested it. Other institutions will expect you to self-migrate your own mailbox before 31 December 2021 when the Hermes email service is scheduled to close.

    • This option is only for people's personal Hermes accounts, not shared mailboxes. Shared mailboxes should be migrated using UIS' bulk migration tool. Contact for details about scheduling bulk migrations.

       Once your migration to Exchange Online has completed:

  • Your old Hermes mailbox will be locked and you will not be able to log in to it again. It is important to bear this in mind if you have used your @hermes.cam.ac.uk email address as the primary and/or recovery email address for any online accounts.

  • All email sent to CRSid@hermes.cam.ac.uk will bounce. The sender will receive a bounce notification suggesting they try re-sending to your @cam.ac.uk email address.

  • Remember to remove the Hermes configuration from all your email clients. (PC, laptop, tablet, smart phone, etc)

  • Users who communicate using PGP-encrypted emails should be aware that Exchange will often rewrite the Content-Type header. This may prevent PGP-enabled clients from automatically detecting the encrypted mail. It should be possible to manually tell the client the email is a PGP-encrypted message and then proceed to decrypt it as normal.

  • For Thunderbird users, we recommend using the TbSync and Exchange ActiveSync plugins with Exchange Online. See: Set up Thunderbird.

  • Mailing lists whose recipients resolve to @cam addresses will not need to be changed.

  • Migrations from Exchange On Premise must be handled as part of a scheduled institutional migration plan. Computer Officers should contact to discuss this.

Important pre-flight checks

  1. Check your eligibility >
  2. Check whether your UIS Password has been synced >

 

How to self-migrate your personal Hermes account

The migration process is easy to do yourself, using the Hermes Migration Tool. The process happens in two phases, so you can continue to use your Hermes email while your inbox is copied over in the background so there's no downtime.

Hermes migration instructions >

Note: Alumni must follow the Alumni Hermes migration instructions.

 

How to access your Exchange Online mailbox

Once you have migrated your Hermes account, you can access your new Exchange Online email account using the Outlook Web App (OWA) webmail interface in your browser and/or by configuring your chosen email client:

Configure your own email client:

Help and support

Hermes migration project

As of 01 March 2021

Exchange Online mailboxes
Personal mailboxes 65,688
Shared milboxes 3,078
Hermes mailboxes to be migrated
Hermes accounts 26,416
Active in last 7 days 14,813
Mailbox migration stats
Self-migrations by users 6,390
Bulk mailbox migrations 498

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