Customer Solution Case Study
/ University Saves $400,000 in Future Hardware Costs by Moving Email to the Cloud
“With Live@edu, students get the same great email service they had using Exchange Server 2007, with 10 times the storage and extra collaboration services, at no cost.”
Walt Brannon, Manager of Messaging and Media Systems, University of New Orleans
The University of New Orleans (UNO) wanted a more scalable email solution and improved online collaboration services for its students. UNO provisioned 45,000 student and alumni accounts to Microsoft Live@edu at no cost. Today, all students are working more productively with anywhere, anytime access to email and storage services in the cloud. UNO can better connect with graduates, and IT is avoiding U.S.$400,000 in future hardware costs.
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published June 2011
Business Needs
Culturally, economically, and intellectually, the University of New Orleans (UNO) is one of the major assets of the city of New Orleans and the state of Louisiana. UNO is an urban research university with a broad range of academic programs, nearly one-quarter of which are at the master’s or doctoral level.
The IT department at UNO works hard to provide top-quality services for faculty, staff, and students. “The Computing Center’s goal is to deploy the best tools for learning,” says Walt Brannon, Manager of Messaging and Media Systems at the University of New Orleans. “Email is one of the most important tools students have on campus, keeping them connected to their faculty, their peers, and their family.”
Every UNO student is added to the university’s on-premises Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 messaging and collaboration solution upon registration. And, based on a decision by UNO administration, students can keep their mailboxes for life. By the beginning of 2010, UNO was maintaining more than 45,000 student mailboxes alone.
“The email environment was getting too large and expensive to maintain,” says Brannon. “And the students wanted more than their allotted 1 gigabyte [GB] of storage space per mailbox. We needed to find an alternative email solution that was scalable and affordable.”
UNO also provided students with 300 megabytes of shared space on its network to store their files. Called iDrive, the service was only accessible to students while on campus. “Students were backing up their papers on USB flash drives and there was a risk that they could lose the devices,” says Brannon. “They wanted a more flexible option where they could access their work from anywhere they could connect to the Internet.”
Solution
When Brannon heard about Microsoft Live@edu, he knew he had found the right student email and collaboration solution for the University of New Orleans. Live@edu is a no-cost suite of hosted communication and collaboration services that includes Microsoft Office Outlook Live web-based email, which provides 10 GB of storage, and Windows Live SkyDrive technology, which provides 25 GB of online storage per user.
UNO was excited about the Live@edu solution because the campus runs on a Microsoft-centric IT infrastructure and IT staffers use the Active Directory Domain Services directory for network resources. “With Live@edu, we could maintain existing student email messages, which makes it simple for the students and simple for us,” says Brannon. “By comparison, Google would be difficult to integrate into our systems. It doesn’t have the functionality of Live@edu, such as creating folders, and it’s not the email solution students will likely encounter in the workforce.”
In the summer of 2010, IT staff created student mailboxes in Live@edu. They automated this process by synchronizing student information from Active Directory to Outlook Live using GALSync, which is now called Outlook Live Directory Sync. For the first four months of the fall term, students could use both Exchange and Live@edu mailboxes and were encouraged to move their mail over themselves.
“We used GALSync and went into Active Directory and instituted split-forwarding,” says Brannon. “When we retired the Exchange solution for students, we used Windows PowerShell scripting to create a personal storage table file for every mailbox in case some students didn’t move their mail to Live@edu by the deadline.”
By the end of 2010, UNO had provisioned 45,000 Live@edu accounts for students and alumni.
Benefits
Today, the IT staff at the University of New Orleans is fulfilling its goal to deploy superior IT tools for learning. “With Live@edu, students get the same great email service they had using Exchange Server 2007, with 10 times the storage and extra collaboration services, at no cost,” says Brannon. “The Alumni Department is glad we have a more cost-effective, scalable email solution that it can rely on to keep in touch with our graduates.”
UNO will be enjoying substantial cost savings by moving student email to the cloud. When it upgrades Exchange Server 2007 to Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 in 2011, IT staffers can use the decommissioned servers that ran student email to host the new solution, saving U.S.$150,000 in hardware costs. “With Live@edu, we’ll never have to buy servers for student email again,” says Brannon. “If you look at the hardware costs when we upgraded students, staff, and faculty to Exchange Server 2007 from 2003, it cost approximately $400,000. We’re not going to be facing those expenses again—that’s money we can use for more strategic IT projects.”
When Brannon polled the students volunteering in the Computing Center about Live@edu, they were impressed with its ease of use. “It was incredibly easy to get started, everything was working fine within minutes,” says John McCann, Music Studies, Fall 2011 at the University of New Orleans.
Students also liked the functionality of Live@edu and the anywhere, anytime access to stored files that they didn’t have with iDrive. “Having 10 gigabytes of space is great and the added features of [Microsoft] Word and [Microsoft] Excel have helped make me more organized and efficient,” says a Biological Sciences student at the University of New Orleans. “I’m also using SkyDrive to store simple files.”
And while UNO resumed classes a mere 42 days after Hurricane Katrina, the university is still trying to get its student enrollment numbers up. “We’re branding the Live@edu landing site with our name, colors, and logo; the service will be a key recruiting tool,” says Brannon. “We have a very student-focused administration and Live@edu is a reflection of that.”
This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.Document published June 2011