A Virginia Tech Personal Access for Collaborative Email (VT PACE) account is a public-facing @vt.edu address backed by Exchange Online or a Google Group.
A VT PACE address is useful for situations when:
With a VT PACE address, a department or workgroup gets:
There are two different types of VT PACE accounts:
The back end of the PACE account is a Google Group that the email will be forwarded to. You can change membership through the Google Group management page, for more information see the knowledgebase article on group management. These PACE accounts are student friendly since anyone can be a group member.
Pros
The back end of your PACE account is an Exchange Online shared mailbox account. This type of PACE is useful if you must have a single location for the mail or need calendar features for the address. Your group must have an organizational unit (OU) in the Hokies domain and an OU administrator to qualify for an Exchange PACE account. Only users who have Hokies accounts can be members of the Exchange account. Hokies accounts are limited to faculty, staff, students, and sponsored individuals, therefore non-Virginia Tech individuals cannot be included. A Google Business option PACE is recommended if you intend for non-Virginia Tech individuals to receive mail from the PACE address.
Pros
Cons
Yes and no. The basic Exchange PACE account does not possess the Archive functionality. However, if a license is purchased for the account, then the functionality becomes available.
A mailbox lacking an Online Archive mailbox (basic Exchange PACE accounts) are not subject to the 4-Year enforced Archive Policy. That Policy would fail even if the mailbox were defined within the policy since the Online Archive mailbox does not exist.
No email is deleted other than what is put in the Deleted Items folder and Junk Mail folder items, those go to Recover Deleted Items for all mailboxes regardless of licensing or policy.
All email in all Deleted Items (and Junk Email) folders goes to Recover Deleted Items after 30 days, this is a Universal/Default rule/policy. If it is not in one of these folders, it doesn't exist - even for admins. See Recovering Deleted Email Items for more information.
Complete the online service catalog form.
You will get a forwarding email of [your-pace-choice]@vt.edu and a Google Group with "[your-pace-choice]-g@vt.edu". Or for Exchange PACE accounts you will get a forwarding email of [your-pace-choice]@vt.edu and an Exchange shared mailbox account in your OU of "[your-pace-choice]-resc@exchange.vt.edu".
If the account is Google-based see the online knowledgebase article here.
If your PACE is Exchange-based access can be granted by an OU admin by having them add you to the account's security group. See the Exchange FAQ for more information on managing resource accounts.
Yes, and no. The actual PACE account forwarders do not support special characters. However we can create an alias for your forward address which can use dashes "-", dots "." and underscores "_".
Example: If you request "our-department@vt.edu", you will get "ourdepartment@vt.edu" with a PACE alias of "our-department@vt.edu". Your Google Group will be "ourdepartment-g@vt.edu" or your Exchange account will be ourdepartment-resc@exchange.vt.edu.
It doesn't matter which address the email is sent to; both will forward into your backend and you can send as the address with the special character.
Yes, if you have a large volume of email and enough complexity in your needs you might want to consider a ticketing system which can offer more functionality than VT PACE accounts can. Or if you have only one person acting as a receiver for mail (such as a secretary) then you should use an email alias instead. You may have a maximum of 5 aliases for each PACE account. For help with management of PACE accounts please open a ServiceNow ticket and assign the ticket to CCS.