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New Exchange Services for Faculty and Staff

Rusty Scott and Joe Volesky

What Will Exchange Provide?

The new Exchange system will provide faculty and staff with a common, feature-rich electronic calendaring and e-mail system that is accessible through both locally installed programs (termed "fat clients") and via powerful web-based tools. Mobile connectivity is available, right from the start, via Smartphone devices currently available through the new Sprint cellular program, fostering greater mobile access to e-mail, calendars, contacts, and tasks. The central Exchange system integrates with existing Exchange environments across campus and provides the infrastructure for additional rich communication tools including chat and video conferencing. Additionally, the central Exchange system will provide 500MB quotas for each mailbox hosted on the system. (In comparison, the Lamar e-mail system provides only about 100MB of storage for faculty and staff mailboxes.)

Rolling out Exchange: the Timeline

During the month of August, ACNS staff worked diligently with Microsoft and consultants to install and configure the new Exchange system. After initial testing and input from users in a designated pilot population, migrations are beginning now for users currently hosted on the existing central Exchange server. ACNS staff will work closely with local IT staff to carefully coordinate the migrations to minimize the impact on users. In October, the new system will be in full production and be offered as an "opt-in" service for all faculty and staff. Through December, those moving to the new system will be assisted with transitions, and training will be provided to familiarize users with the new system.

Transitioning from Oracle Calendar

The transition plan for moving from Oracle Calendar to Exchange has been discussed at length. A low-tech approach that has worked successfully at other universities has been selected. The plan is simple: all meetings up to January 1, 2007 are to be scheduled in Oracle Calendar, and all meetings scheduled after that date will be scheduled in the new Exchange system. This implies that for a (relatively short) period of time, access to both systems will be required, but only as a one-time transition effort. It is important that those currently utilizing Oracle Calendar continue to do so through January 1, 2007. If users transition entirely to Exchange from Oracle Calendar before that date, they won't be able to cross-schedule with those still using Oracle Calendar.

How Does the New Exchange System Affect Me?

Those using the current campus calendaring standard, Oracle Calendar (formerly Corporate Time), will experience the greatest impact. The need to provide a single electronic calendaring system for faculty and staff spurred the initial motivation and effort to move to a common collaboration suite. Because Exchange so tightly integrates e-mail and electronic calendaring, change is on the horizon for many, and the degree of change relates to both e-mail and electronic calendaring. How this affects you (if at all) is largely dependent on the location of your current e-mail services:

• Using Departmental/College-managed Exchange? Unless your department is migrating services to the new central Exchange system, little change will come your way: Beginning January 1, 2007, you will be able to cross-schedule with many more faculty and staff on campus via Exchange Calendar.
• Using central (ACNS) Exchange? Those who currently have Exchange mailboxes on ACNS's Exchange server will have their mailbox migrated from that server to the new Exchange 2007 cluster. This migration is slated to start mid-September, will last through the fall semester, and ACNS will work directly with departments affected to ensure a smooth transition. While some minor changes to users' desktops will be required, this particular migration should be fairly transparent to the user.
• Using central Unix (Lamar) mail? Those who are using Lamar e-mail and the Oracle Calendar system (or those who are only utilizing Lamar) have the option to migrate their e-mail to the central Exchange system. In October, users in this population will be able to request an Exchange e-mail account via the eIdentity web site at www.eid.colostate.edu. Documentation and tools will be available to aid in the transition from Lamar e-mail/Oracle Calendar to Exchange.
• Using non-central, non-Exchange e-mail? Similar to those using Lamar e-mail and Oracle Calendar, those desiring to migrate their e-mail services to central Exchange can do so starting in October, and the same tools and documentation for Lamar users will apply to migrations for this population.

Training

CTSS will be providing a number of training sessions for Outlook, the standard method for accessing Exchange. You can view the schedule for training sessions and sign up at the CTSS training web site at www.ctss.colostate.edu/content_training.aspx. Also, a web site containing the latest information relevant to this project, including project updates, documentation for migration and for using the new Exchange system, and more, is available at help.mail.colostate.edu.

How It All Began...

In support of a new Exchange initiative to provide collaboration services (e-mail, electronic calendaring, and more), a committee was formed to develop a hardware architecture design and an implementation plan to provide these services to faculty and staff. This hard-working committee with campus-wide representation presented its plan to the ITEC Advisory Council (IAC) in April and then to the IT Executive Committee in June. In accordance with the charge from Pat Burns and the IAC, the plan:

• Included direction for building hardware
• Focused on providing new, updated Exchange services for faculty and staff
• Described a transition plan for those currently using the campus standard Oracle Calendar solution
• Outlined plans for transitioning to Exchange e-mail for those who desire.

Under the Hood

The new Exchange system was designed and constructed with two main goals in mind: scalability and reliability. Developments in both software and hardware technologies make it possible to "cluster" both the server application and the disk storage system. Clustering is the coupling of many systems so they can be viewed as a single entity, introducing redundancy and eliminating single points of failure. Clustering increases performance (via multiple systems working in parallel) and provides for scalability, since additional "nodes" can be added to the cluster. Conceptually, the new Exchange system for faculty and staff looks something like this:

The Microsoft Rapid Deployment Program (RDP) for Exchange 2007

Currently, ACNS and several departments and colleges run Exchange 2003 in their IT environments. While the original intent was to bring up a central Exchange 2003 system, CSU was offered an opportunity to participate in a Microsoft RDP to deploy Exchange 2007 before its general public release later this year. The Microsoft RDP for Exchange 2007 includes access to top-level Microsoft support engineers, the Exchange 2007 product team, and five weeks of free on-site consulting by Microsoft Consulting Services. The advantages to adopting Exchange 2007 now include more features and a better interface for users, the opportunity to capitalize on high-end technical support from Microsoft, and the avoidance of an inevitable upgrade process to Exchange 2007 later. After many conversations with the program managers and technical staff at Microsoft, CSU and Microsoft entered the RDP agreement in mid-July.

Many Thanks!

This project continues to move forward thanks to a number of committed individuals across campus who have provided their valuable time and insights to committees and working groups. The ACNS staff is thankful for the dedicated people throughout the campus who are willing to participate in such an important and far-reaching initiative.

— Rusty Scott, Associate Director, ACNS
— Joe Volesky, ACNS