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Special Annual Awards
2008 Campus Technology Innovators: Collaboration Tools
8/1/2008
THE COMPREHENSIVE E-MAIL conversion at Texas A&M involved 80,000 maiboxes and more than 22 million messages in the mailstore, yet the migration required only 12 hours of downtime.
TECHNOLOGY AREA: COLLABORATION TOOLS
Innovator: Texas A&M University
When a campus is forced to replace an outmoded e-mail system from the ground up, technologists and administrators opt for a full-featured, multi-faceted collaboration system instead-- and more than just communication takes off.
With the 2007 fall semester drawing to a close and the campus community winding down for the holidays, campus IT leaders at Texas A&M University were gearing up for a major overhaul of their campus communications systems. The problem they were facing had a familiar ring-- one echoed on many other campuses across the country: "Our legacy e-mail system is stuck in the early 2000s!" Of course, students, faculty, and staff were growing increasingly tech-savvy and had been exposed to full-featured consumer e-mail and collaboration services, so expectations were running high on campus. The migration to a new solution had to be smooth and timely, and the new system had to offer much more than basic e-mail.
As Michael W. Bolton, associate director for systems, explains, the Texas A&M IT team, headed by Senior Information Technology Manager Cheryl Cato, moved quickly to replace the universitys old Sendmail system in a compressed time frame and with relatively few problems. The conversion was extensive, including all 80,000 mailboxes and more than 22 million messages in the mailstore. "We had to change years of support procedures and processes," says Bolton, "from provisioning new accounts for customers, to deleting accounts for people who left the university. Everything had to change."
By full production cutover on February 2, 2008-- a mere three weeks from initial installation and testing-- the entire university e-mail customer base had been moved to the Zimbra Collaboration Suite platform. There had been only 12 hours of downtime. The new e-mail and collaboration platform was integrated with hardware, software, and storage platforms from IBM, Novell, and NetApp, without incident.
But the real excitement came with the knowledge that the entire university communications infrastructure had been upgraded to provide constituents a true collaboration system, one that not only would bring the campus up-to-date, but also would provide tools to respond to future constituent expectations.
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