Durham, NC - Duke's Fuqua School of Business has announced its intention to adopt the Microsoft Exchange Server platform, the communications and collaboration solution most widely used in the business world today.

The decision was made in consultation with the members of the MBA Association (MBAA), the school's student organization.

Fuqua officials said students and others supported the move for several reasons:

-- Microsoft Exchange is the messaging and collaboration tool that students are already familiar with and that they will most likely use after graduation.

-- Exchange provides the ability to manage e-mail, calendars, contacts and tasks in a single application.

-- Exchange Server provides integration with all Microsoft Office applications currently in use, as well as with other collaboration tools that Fuqua plans to introduce in the very near future.

"The vast majority of our students are coming from businesses where integrated collaboration platforms are the norm," said Randy Haskin, Fuqua's director of business systems & IT strategy. "As a result, they have become increasingly frustrated with the existing stand-alone applications we've been using Duke Mail and MeetingMaker as they lack the overall ease-of-use of an integrated platform like Microsoft Exchange."

Vibhor Chhabra, technology executive officer on the MBAA board, agreed. "We have been lobbying for this for some time," Chhabra said. "I'm gratified to see the decision being made. This will help make email and scheduling much easier for the students."

The transition will start almost immediately, with 25 to 30 people moving to the Exchange platform for a trial test in March, and the rest of the school moving over in June. Immediately upon completion of the initial rollout, Fuqua plans to begin evaluating additional Exchange collaboration services, including Unified Messaging, SharePoint and Live@edu, Microsoft's free educational collaboration suite.

Fuqua's goal is to make it easier and more efficient for its faculty, staff, students and alumni to collaborate.

"Fuqua won't run Microsoft Exchange itself," Haskin said. "The most efficient use of our resources and the resources of Duke as a whole is to have OIT [the Duke Office of Information Technology, which administers Duke's core IT infrastructure] host the Exchange platform. This will save us money, and it will mean that other organizations across campus interested in Exchange will be able to leverage OIT's infrastructure and won't have to host it on their own servers, either."