Four months after moving its faculty, staff and students onto a Microsoft Exchange Server platform (see: "Fuqua Plans Trial of Microsoft Exchange," March 18, 2009), Randy Haskin, Fuqua's director of business systems & IT strategy reports satisfaction with the transition process, and the new environment. "Early on in the planning process, we communicated the benefits, rationale and time line for making the move to Microsoft Exchange and, as a result, the vast majority of our users were on board and eager to make the transition," Haskin explains. "Overall, the feedback from our faculty, staff and students has been very positive." Fuqua was moving some 120 faculty, 260 staff and 900 students from the OIT-standard DukeMail (a Sun Microsystems product) and Meeting Maker (from PeopleCube). After carefully considering several migration approaches, Fuqua decided on using a two-phase approach that separated out the email migration from the calendar migration. In addition, the decision was made to provide users with a "self-service" model for migrating all of their historical calendar and e-mail data into Exchange. Kevin Smith, who manages Fuqua's IT service desk, says that they broke down the e-mail migration by department and worked closely with OIT to switch these smaller groups of accounts on a staggered schedule, to ensure they could support users during the transition. The entire school was moved from Meeting Maker to Exchange calendar on the same day, so that scheduling was always on a single system. "We expected users to move their data themselves for the most part," Smith says, "but we had support personnel available in the computer labs to help anyone who needed it." Microsoft has concentrated on perfecting the interplay between Exchange services and its products for Windows-based PCs (the most satisfying experience for using Exchange mail and calendaring, for instance, is Microsoft Outlook, part of the MS Office suite of applications), which makes Exchange attractive to the 90 percent of Fuqua staff and 85 percent of Fuqua students who use PCs. The Microsoft site license, announced just before the beginning of the fall term, makes things easier for students, as well, since they can have the MS Office suite on their machines at no additional cost. Because the Microsoft platform is the most widely used communications and collaboration solution in the business world today, it has attracted many partnerships with other vendors eager to make their products integrate well with Exchange services. RIM Blackberry, for example, offers its Blackberry Enterprise Server product to synchronize mail and calendar files between PCs and its wireless devices. Even Apple has accepted the ubiquity of Microsoft Exchange. The versions of Mail and iCal bundled with Apple's latest operating system release, Snow Leopard, support Microsoft Exchange mail and calendar, and Smith points out that the easy integration between Exchange and the iPod touch allows Fuqua staff to have their mail and calendar at their fingertips anywhere wi-fi is available. Josh Rynne, current Technology Chair on the board of the Fuqua MBA Association (MBAA), the school's student government, agrees. "It took me one minute to set up my Fuqua mail and calendar on my iPhone," he says, "and I haven't had a problem since." In general, he says, students have been very pleased with the move to Exchange. It's worth noting that Fuqua decided on its trial use of Exchange partially at the urging of Vibhor Chhabra, Fuqua graduate and Rynne's predecessor in the technology position on the MBAA board. Fuqua's IT groups is taking full advantage of the easy integration of Exchange with other platforms. Users can now use FuquaWorld, the school's portal, to view their personal Exchange calendars and add items from the school's event calendar to their personal schedules with the click of a button. Haskin has praise for Duke's Office of Information Technology (OIT) in this process, as well. "We looked at many different ways to accomplish this move," he says, "including having a third party host our Exchange environment and turning the school's e-mail, calendaring and collaboration needs completely over to Microsoft's Live@edu Web-based environment. In the end, OIT was able to stand up our test environment and then expand capacity to accommodate all our users in a very short time. We made the decision to go with OIT's Exchange environment in December 2008, and we were migrating our people in May 2009." OIT is now working with Fuqua personnel to test MS SharePoint, which facilitates Web-based collaboration and document management, and other Microsoft products.
