Lotus Notes to Exchange Migration with Office 2007

Project Home

EXCHANGE    |    Background    |    Status    |    Schedule    |    Training    |    Archive & Retention    |    FAQ

STUDENT EMAIL

OFFICE    |    Background    |    Status    |    Schedule    |    Training    |    FAQ

Exchange: Background

Old Dominion University is moving from Lotus Notes to Microsoft Exchange 2007 for all Faculty and Staff email, calendaring, and instant messaging.  Student email will be outsourced to a yet undetermined third party provider, that can provide many more services than just email.

Why?

• Reliability Issues
  • Buggy software updates
  • Poor technical support
• Email survey
  • desktop and web interfaces are cumbersome and unintuitive
  • the SPAM filtering needed improvement
  • the quotas are too low
  • archiving is difficult.

For these reasons we have investigated other email systems.  We looked not just for a replacement to eMail and Calendaring, but to position ourselves for the future.

Upcoming Technology Enhancements

• Integration with office tools such as word processing and spreadsheets
• Unified Messaging (voice mail and faxes delivered to your InBox)
• An archiving solution with policies on email retention and data preservation
• "Push" email technology to mobile devices
• Collaboration tools for group projects
• Enhanced SPAM filtering

As discussed and approved by ITAC, the University has decided to implement Microsoft Exchange 2007 for Faculty and Staff email, and to outsource the student emails.  Several companies now offer free student email, and offer more storage and services than the University could provide, including email for alumni.

Microsoft Exchange

• Outlook was the most desirable solution mentioned in the survey
• Is finely integrated with the Office 2007 suite of applications, making it easy to do things like mail merges.
• Support for mobile devices such as windows mobile devices and Palm handhelds via ActiveSync.
• Improved usability for MAC and Unix users since the webmail client for Exchange 2007 is fully functional in:
  • Internet Explorer
  • Firefox
  • Safari
  • Opera

The series of products acquired will provide not only basic email and calendaring to the desktop and mobile device, but also instant messaging and archiving capabilities, as well as better integration with office productivity software.