Beyond simple e-mail: upgrading an entire campus to enterprise e-mail and calendaring with groupwise

Abstract

Since the early 90s Drew University has provided basic email services to all students, faculty, and staff, standardizing on IMAP-based email in 1999. First supported in conjunction with the Netscape Communicator and later with Mozilla, the IMAP service has proven to be inexpensive to maintain, but had limitations. Most often cited was the lack of scheduling capabilities, resulting in many departments adopting their own unsupported solutions such as Yahoo! Calendar. The inability of the system to support "push" email services, such as BlackBerry was also a concern.To address these issues, University Technology began migrating users to Novell GroupWise starting in fall 2005. Pilot users, including the President's office, were migrated in the fall, with a phased deployment of GroupWise to all users starting in Spring 2006. A cross-departmental task force formed to manage the migration process.This session explores how we addressed the challenges faced when migrating users from a lowest common denominator IMAP service to an enterprise system such as GroupWise. We will discuss issues involved in communicating with the campus, a phased approach to migration, and the creation of customized support and training for faculty, staff, and students. The session will also address the use of web-based self-service tools to ease the transition, tactical deployment of support to address areas of need, and effective use of tools--such as desktop management and incident tracking systems--to facilitate the migration.IT staff who are in the process of planning a campus-wide transition of email systems should attend this session.