Leaving BCIT Considerations for Outlook

Future meetings you have been invited to should not pose a problem after your departure, although you may choose to delegate your attendance to another staff if appropriate. However, the meetings you have organized (meetings you Chair), will require some action. Once your email account has been disabled by IT Services, those meetings you created will be “orphaned”. That means that nobody else will be able to make changes to them such as modifying dates or attendees. Since you cannot assign a new meeting organizer in Outlook, it is recommended that you cancel those meetings and ask another staff to send new invitations in your place. Alternatively, you could Delegate your Calendar to another staff or replacement so they can continue to manage your meetings but note that this will only work temporarily (until your mailbox is potentially removed).

Interestingly, there is known workaround in Outlook that allows a delegate to transfer meetings to their own Calendar. This of course should be done for each meeting (or series of meetings) before your account gets removed.

Unlike regular meetings, any Webex meetings you have organized will no longer be accessible after your departure. This is regardless of whether or not your mailbox has been retained for a period of time or not. Those meetings need to be cancelled and re-booked by another staff before you leave BCIT.

Have you been granted rights to book or manage a Meeting Room Calendar? If so it is extremely important to contact IT Services to remove your account or transfer the rights to another staff before your departure. This will ensure bookings continue to get processed appropriately and avoid anomalies in the Calendars themselves.

Some individuals at BCIT have the role of managing their department’s or team’s Distribution groups in the Global Directory. If you have such as role, it would be important to contact IT Services to identify another staff to take over the management of the group(s) to ensure they are maintained for accuracy in the future.

If you are simply a member of a Group and know the group owner in your area, consider reminding them of your departure date so that they can remove your name from it and substitute another staff if appropriate.

Over the years, you may have accumulated business and networking contacts that may need to be shared with other colleagues at BCIT before you leave.

Contacts can be exported via the Outlook Export feature to a CSV file. Email the file to a colleague and they can easily import them into their own Contacts. Note that you can also export to a PST file which can then be opened by someone else using Outlook.

Personal Groups need to be shared differently. The easiest method would be to drag and drop the Group(s) in question to a folder in File Explorer (on your computer). After sending these files to another person, they can easily drag and drop the group(s) directly into their Contacts.

Consider enabling an Out-Of-Office message to alert your colleagues of your departure and who they should contact after you have left. Since your email address may remain “active” for a certain time after your departure, the feedback from the Out-Of-Office emails can be invaluable for business continuity.

Have you created Mail Rules that auto-forward messages to other accounts or provide automated replies? These should be disabled or re-worded to reflect the pending removal of your account.

BCIT records

Some messages you may have filed away could be important to BCIT or your colleagues. Consider forwarding those messages to an appropriate staff or even saving the information in a permanent repository such as Sharespace or Records Management. Note that you can easily drag-and drop a selection of messages straight into a folder on your computer for safekeeping or use Outlook’s Export feature.

Personal records

After you have left BCIT, it is possible the Leadership can request access to your mailbox to search for BCIT-related information. It is always advisable to delete any items of personal nature (using Shift-Delete) from your folders. Note that entire folders can be exported to a PST file as well for access outside BCIT using Outlook’s Export feature.

For additional information, please contact the Technology Service Desk (604-412-7444 – option 1).