Customer Solution Case Study
/ / University Creates Core Infrastructure Plan to Enhance Productivity and Collaboration
Overview
Country or Region:The Netherlands
Industry:Education—Higher education
Customer Profile
Tilburg University provides higher education programs in Dutch and English and serves 12,000 students with 1,700 staff members.
Business Situation
A survey showedthat students and staffwanted better mobile and collaboration solutions using integrated, mainstream software.
Solution
Tilburg University is replacing its Novell infrastructure with Microsoft®e-mail, collaboration, directory services, monitoring, and security infrastructure.
Benefits
Improved user convenience and productivity
Richer collaboration
Faster application delivery
Easier infrastructure management, more customer focus / “[With Microsoft] We will be able to shift our efforts from running infrastructure to adding value.We’ll be able to be more proactive in delivering services.”
Corno Vromans, IT Manager, Tilburg University
Tilburg University serves 12,000 students in the southern part of the Netherlands, with programs inthe social sciences and humanities. Though its Novell file, print, mail, and directory infrastructure had served the university for 18 years, the students and staff wanted better mobility and collaboration supportin an integrated environment. The IT staff jettisoned its Novell business productivity infrastructure and isreplacing it with Microsoft® programs to gain not only the desired integration, but to better support university policy of buying off-the-shelf applications. Tilburg University worked with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Winvision to create a three-year roadmap for deploying the new infrastructure, which will enable the IT staff to easily integrate business productivity functions for increased user productivity, and to respond more quickly to user needs.
Situation
Tilburg University serves the southern part of the Netherlands with a full complement of academic departments, with faculties in economics and business administration, social and behavioral sciences, humanities, Catholic theology, and law, and instruction in both Dutch and English. Located in the city of Tilburg, the university has a student population of 12,000 and a staff of 1,700 people, including 170 full professors.
Like most universities, Tilburg has a mixed technology infrastructure:
100 open source servers that run a number of Linux operating systemsand host a shared-workspace application, clustered Oracle databases, Apache Webservers,collaboration tools, the Blackboard learning management system, e-mailservers, library applications, and other educational applications.
35 servers running the Windows Server® 2003 operating system, educational applications, video streaming software, and Windows® Terminal Services for remote access to certain applications.
15 Novell servers running directory services, file and print, e-mail messaging, software distribution,and lifecycle management software.
Lack of Integration
While the Novell environment was running trouble-free, students and faculty became impatient with the lack of integration between the university’s e-mail, calendar, file and print, and collaboration applications. “For 18 years, we’ve run our business productivity environment on Novell, and 18 years ago, Novell was a leader in scalable file and print services,” says Corno Vromans, IT Manager at Tilburg University. “But from an end-user services perspective, our environment was a patchwork quilt. We used the Oracle calendar program, Novell NetMail servers, Novell file and print, and the BSCW [Be Smart—Cooperate Worldwide] file-sharing application. They’re all good products, but faculty and students wanted better integration, mobility, and collaboration in a mainstream environment.”
Specifically, users wanted their calendar and e-mail programs integrated to simplify meeting setup. Although many students and faculty used the Microsoft® Office Outlook® messaging and collaboration client, that software did not integrate well with the Oracle collaboration and calendar programs. Vromans’s staff tried to install an Oracle connector to make Office Outlook work with the Oracle calendar, but the effort was unsuccessful.
Limited Mobile Access
Users also wanted better mobile access to e-mail messages, calendars, files, workflow, collaborative Web sites (wikis), and university applications. Smartphones in particular have been proliferating on campus, and users wanted to use them as handy conduits to needed information. “It was very difficult to seamlessly fit those devices into our mixed environment,” Vromans says.
Poor Collaboration
Users also wanted easier, more powerful collaboration with peers within and outside the university. They used BSCWfor sharing documents; once they uploaded a document to BSCW, they or others could access it, make changes, and replace it. However, BSCW has limited versioning or workflow capabilities, so tracking changes from multiple people over time was cumbersome. Users often resorted to simply routing documents in e-mail as attachments.
IT Stumbling Block
The infrastructure hindered the IT staff’s ability to quickly respond to user needs and roll out new services. “Students and staff just learned to work in our environment, but they are using Microsoft applications at home and in other jobs, and they found it hard to get used to our environment,” Vromans says. “We did everything we could to meet their needs, but we, too, knew that there were products out there that would make our jobs so much easier.”
For example, it took Vromans’s staff several months to develop a simple connector to enable students to open their e-mail inboxes from the Blackboard student portal. “My staff spent too much time on the technology underpinnings, hindering us from providing real value to our customers,” says Vromans. Also, Vromans worried about the shrinking pool of Novell talent available to support the school’s Novell eDirectory structure.
Solution
Ultimately, the university’s board issued a mandate to the IT staff: Move the university to a mainstream business productivity infrastructure. “Only one company offers mainstream business productivity solutions, and that’s Microsoft,” Vromans says. “That was the environment that most staff and students were familiar with, so that’s the direction we headed.”
Build a Proof of Concept
Because replacing the long-standing Novell environment and some Linux-based applications would be a major infrastructure change, Vromans took a gradual, methodical approach. He contacted Winvision, a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in Nieuwegein, the Netherlands, to help design the ideal infrastructure and construct a proof of concept for the new environment.
“Before we disrupted our current infrastruc-ture, we wanted to be certain what users really wanted,” says Robert Diepstraten, Team Leader of the Office Automation Team and Technical Project Leader at Tilburg University. “We gathered user needs, and created a proof of concept to show them what the new environment would look like. We wanted their full endorsement before we started to build anything.”
As a Microsoft partner, Winvision provides a broad range of business productivity solutions and specializes in infrastructure optimization. “If we had to build the proof of concept ourselves, it would have taken us three years; with Winvision’s help, it took us six months,” Diepstraten says.
When the prototype infrastructure was completed, in late 2007, hundreds of students and staff members evaluated it. All gave it an enthusiastic endorsement and affirmed that it met their needs for improved application integration, mobile information access, and collaboration.
Create a Roadmap
The IT staff then worked with Winvision to create a detailed three-year roadmap for reproducing the proof-of-concept solution in the university’s production environment, with costs and timetables spelled out at each stage. “The roadmap tells us where we are now, where we are going, and the steps we have to take to get there,” Vromans says. “It not only helps us schedule the work and obtain funding for the project, but it helps us deal with constituents who are asking for new services. We can respond by showing them that we have a plan and showing them when their desired service will be addressed.”
Winvision based its technology roadmap on the Microsoft Core Infrastructure Optimization Model, which provides a step-by-step process for assessing an organization’s technology infrastructure and matching its business goals with needed technology investments. The roadmap for Tilburg University spans three years and covers the following sequential steps:
Virtualization. The first project, completed in late 2008, was to use virtualization software to consolidate the university’s server holdings from 150 to about 20 host servers, spread over two locations.
Directory services. The next project was to design an Active Directory®directory service that could better support the university’s identity management needs.
System monitoring. In late 2009, the university will implement Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager 2007, both part of the Microsoft System Center family of system management products. The IT staff will use these programs to install software on and monitor its Microsoft-based domain, file, print, security, messaging, and collaboration servers.
Application virtualization.Also in late 2009, Tilburg University will implement Microsoft Application Virtualization (App-V), software that enables applications to be deployed to client computers on an as-needed basis from a virtual application server. With application virtualization, the university will be able to give students and staff access to the same applications on and offcampus.
Messaging software.In early 2010, Tilburg will replace Novell NetMail with Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 messaging software, which will enable easy integration of e-mail and calendar programs through the Office Outlook client. The university will also deploy the Microsoft Live@Edu network of Internet services for students. This suite of services spans e-mail, instant messaging, photo and video manipulation, and online backup.
Collaboration. In mid-2010, Tilburg will deploy Microsoft Office SharePoint® Server 2007 as its standard collaboration foundation.
Security software. The university will deploy Microsoft Forefront™ security software to help safeguard both client and server computers and Microsoft Forefront Security for SharePoint and Microsoft Forefront Security for Exchange Server.
Benefits
With its business productivity infrastructure running on Microsoft software, Tilburg University will be able to meet user demands for application integration,mobility, and collaboration. The IT staff also believes that it will be able to deliver applications faster and more cost effectively with the Microsoft environment.
Improved User Convenience and Productivity
Once calendars, contacts, collaboration, file, and print services are integrated on user desktop computers, portable computers, and smartphones, faculty, students, and staff will be able to work much more easily and productively throughout the day. They will no longer have to open and close multiple applications and cut and paste information to accomplish basic tasks. Instead, they will be able to take advantage of the built-in integration between the programs in the 2007 Microsoft Office system, Exchange Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007 to accomplish these tasks with a minimum number of mouse clicks.
Corno adds that most smartphones work out of the box with Microsoft applications and will require little or no work from the IT staff to establish security-enhanced connections to Microsoft-based applications. Staff and students will be able to access documents and university applications from their mobile phones for on-the-go flexibility and productivity.
“My staff was surprised at how easy it was to integrate smartphones into our network using Active Directory,” Vromans says. “Within hours, we had the phones automatically retrieving settings from Exchange Server 2007.”
Richer Collaboration
The use of SharePoint sites will enhance the anytime, anywhere accessibility of personalized information and applications. Users can retrieve documents from SharePoint sites using any Web browser and their smartphones. Office SharePoint Server 2007 will provide teamsites, document version control, workflow, and Enterprise Search. Best of all, “My customers are in control,” Vromans says. “They don’t need an ITexpert to setup collaboration sites for them.”
For example, the university’s legal depart-ment has requested an online digital archive, which the IT staff cannot create in the current BSCW environment. “I hope to be able to deliver this archive very quickly with Office SharePoint Server 2007,” Vromans says.“Our researchers work on projects with other researchers all over the world. Some of them have experimented with Office SharePoint Server 2007 and cannot wait to have it as a standard university service.”
Faster Application Delivery
Vromans believes that the Microsoft infrastructure will help the IT staff deliver applications faster. This will both satisfy user needs sooner and free the IT staff to spend more time researching technologies and developing more end-user services.
“My end users will get the integration, mobility, and collaboration that they requested, in an environment that they are familiar with,” Vromans says. “My staff will be able to respond to user needs faster. We will be able to shift our efforts from running infrastructure to adding value to our customers. We’ll be able to be more proactive in delivering services and also react much faster to business requests.”
The IT staff also appreciates the opportunity to become familiar with the more popular Microsoft suite of programs. “My staff knows that their Novell knowledge is not very valuable in the market,” Vromans says. “They are very happy to move to a Microsoft environment, because Microsoft expertise is in demand everywhere.”
Easier Infrastructure Management, More Customer Focus
By implementing Microsoft tools, the Tilburg University IT staff has less concern about keeping the basic infrastructure up and running, giving it more time to support the university’s primary business of research and education. “There is no added value in running e-mailservers,” Vromans says. “That’s why we outsource this facility to Microsoft. Using Microsoft software, we have more time for contact with our customers to help them with specific processes and IT needs.”
Microsoft Infrastructure Optimization
With infrastructure optimization, you can build a secure, well-managed, and dynamic core IT infrastructure that can reduce overall IT costs, make better use of resources, and become a strategic asset for the business. The Infrastructure Optimization model—with basic, standardized, rationalized, and dynamic levels—was developed by Microsoft using industry best practices and Microsoft’s own experiences with enterprise customers. The Infrastructure Optimization model provides a maturity framework that is flexible and easily used as a benchmark for technical capability and business value.
For more information about Microsoft infrastructure optimization, go to: