COLUMBUS STATE'S VIRTUAL IDENTITY CHANGE TAKES BIG STEP THIS WEEKEND

COLUMBUS, Ga., April 21 -- Columbus State University issued the following news release:

Columbus State University's presence on the Internet has been migrating for almost a year to a new domain, ColumbusState.edu.

That effort will take a major step forward this weekend when university IT professionals switch every email account on campus to its addresses ending in @ColumbusState.edu.

Columbus State's decision to switch from the current colstate.edu domain to ColumbusState.edu was a natural progression in the university's desire to more clearly identify itself and to better promote the name it's most commonly known by to regions beyond Columbus.

Unlike websites and email addresses that end in .com, any organization that has a .edu domain is required by law to only have one address. The rules do allow a year for the migration of everything to the new address. CSU started moving all of its 133,500 web pages in August of 2010. About 65 percent of the university's pages are now reassigned to www.

ColumbusState.edu.

This weekend marks a milestone in the project. Starting the evening of Friday, April 22, 2011, after most employees go home, computer experts will change the last part of every university-associated e-mail to end in @ColumbusState.edu.

The work involves about 30,000 different email accounts. "We're moving all of their contacts, all of their emails, all of their calendars and all of their documents. That amounts to somewhere in the range of 1.7 Terabytes of data," said Bob Diveley, executive director of operations and infrastructure for CSU's University Information and Technology Services.

In layman's terms, that means more than 300 million individual emails will move from one server to another.

Until the transformation of all websites to the new name is complete in August, existing address with colstate.edu at the end will continue to work and forward to the new address, and there should be no disruption in terms of lost email. However, a year-long transition will end on Aug. 2, colstate.edu will no longer be used in any of the university's websites and email sent to addresses ending with colstate.edu will bounce.

"With better than 132,000 individual web pages, this is obviously an extensive project," Jay Knape, CSU's manager of web services and the project leader for the domain change. "An extensive committee has guided the process and we've had a lot of behind-the-scenes workers involved. It's been smooth so far, and we are confident that we'll be successful in changing everything to our new online name."

To find out more about the project, go online to www.

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