Since 1999, Butler University has been running an on premise Microsoft Exchange© system. While the system has served us well, the technological landscape has changed significantly since then. As technology intersects our day to day operations more and more, the university’s need to support various systems continues to grow. The landscape in higher education has changed significantly as well. Rising costs have many current generation students asking the question “is it really all worth it?” As such, we need to be good stewards of resources if want to continue to grow, control costs, and be able differentiate ourselves from our competition. With Microsoft, Google© and other competitors offering hosting email services to universities at low cost, switching allows IT staff to focus on initiatives that provide more differentiating value.
Over a period of several years, IT watched as cloud email systems matured and experienced adoption. IT piloted Google Mail for an extended period of time and other systems were reviewed. A decision was made to migrate to Exchange Online, Microsoft’s hosted email system that is a part of the firm’s enterprise cloud platform Office 365. The university was familiar with using Exchange, the lack of licensing costs, the amount of storage, and features were in line with what the university needed.
With a system as important as email, and given the other priorities we have in IT, and the one time nature of the project, it made sense to engage a consulting firm to help speed up implementation. We evaluated several firms and went with SADA©, an outfit from California who has performed hundreds of migrations. Our team worked closely with theirs to envision and implement the environment necessary for migrations to occur. There were many technical hurdles (firewall woes, Voicemail Drama, migration issues to name a few) to jump over, but in the end we were able to get the environment implemented and working.
Over a period of several months, we migrated all the student, alumni, and affiliate mailboxes migrated. With the assistance of the great staff at the Help Desk, Application Operations, Tech Development, and Tier 2 areas helping clients learn new URLS and reconfigure phones, we made it through in one piece (depending on who you talk to :))
A pause in migrations to discuss changes in backup was needed, but in 2017 we are looking forward to migrate faculty and staff mailboxes to complete the migration once and for all.
This project has taught us many things about moving a large enterprise system to the cloud regarding operations, backup, security, support, virtually everything involved in having such a system. We hope that some of these learnings will help future moves to the cloud.