Waubonsee Community College

Success Story

Community college migrates from Microsoft* Exchange to Novell® GroupWise® for increased availability, security and significantly lower total cost of ownership

Overview

Waubonsee Community College, a two-year public institution of higher learning, encompasses 12 school districts in the western suburbs of Chicago. The college has 11,000 students and more than 1,000 faculty and staff.

Challenge

Waubonsee Community College needed to replace its aging Microsoft* Exchange 5.5 system that was unreliable and running out of space. The IT staff had to reboot the system nearly every week and was forced to schedule several hours of downtime to perform regular maintenance.

Security was also a primary concern, as the College needed to protect confidential student information and sensitive financial data. The College had also been hit by several viruses in the past few years, requiring a day or two of cleanup after each incident.

Novell solution

"Stability was the most critical issue in our move to Novell GroupWise. We kept our Exchange system updated, but it was not reliable. With GroupWise, we have had zero downtime since our implementation. Downtime is simply no longer an issue for us."

Ed Leninger
CIO
Waubonsee Community College

Waubonsee Community College evaluated an upgrade to Exchange before selecting Novell® GroupWise® as the best long-term solution. To complete the migration, the College worked with Denmac Systems, LLC, a Novell Platinum partner, recipient of the Novell Service Excellence Award and the Midwest Partner of the Year.

"As part of our assessment, we performed a cost comparison which determined that upgrading their Exchange system would be two to three times more expensive than moving to GroupWise," said Tom Alrich, senior account manager at Denmac Systems LLC. "Once the options were considered, we were able to leverage our experience in Exchange to GroupWise migrations to make the integration seamless and the cutover transparent."

Working with Denmac, the College implemented GroupWise within a few months, including the planning, testing and a clean data migration for nearly 700 users. The College consolidated from two Exchange servers to one GroupWise post office running on a two-node cluster for added reliability.

"Stability was the most critical issue in our move to Novell GroupWise," said Ed Leninger, CIO of Waubonsee Community College. "We kept our Exchange system updated, but it was never reliable. With GroupWise, we have had zero downtime since our implementation. Downtime is simply no longer an issue for us."

Having a stable e-mail platform has reduced the amount of off-hour support calls by 50 percent. The IT staff has significantly reduced its administration time and no longer needs to reboot its systems on a regular basis.

The College estimates that nearly 80 percent of its incoming e-mail is spam. Novell GroupWise, along with Barracuda and GWAVA* products, has dramatically reduced unwanted e-mail and protects against virus attacks. The efficient storage management in Novell GroupWise also ensures that mailboxes don't get overloaded.

The College also uses Novell NetMail® to provide Internet e-mail to all its students. NetMail is a low-cost solution that allows students to communicate with each other, as well as with adjunct faculty who may not have offices on campus. The university can also send e-mail messages and notices to all its students, rather than relying on postal mail.

"We are one of the few community colleges to offer e-mail to our students," said Chris Shields, Network/Desktop Support Services Manager at Waubonsee Community College. "With NetMail, we get a seamless integration with GroupWise and can offer new functionality to students that we couldn't before."

The College has plans to migrate to GroupWise 7 when it is released and is also evaluating a move to Linux*. The College is already running its online course materials, Web servers and MySQL* databases on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server and is looking ahead to a Linux-based administrative system.

Novell ZENworks® helps the College manage 1,500 desktops. The IT staff deploys applications on a daily basis from a central location without having to travel to individual workstations. The policy management features of ZENworks allow the staff to distribute applications to specific groups of users.

"ZENworks significantly reduces our IT overhead costs," said Shields. "We'd have to double our staff without it. It made all the difference in our GroupWise roll-out."

Results

Migrating from Microsoft Exchange 5.5 to Novell GroupWise has dramatically increased system uptime for Waubonsee Community College, while providing greater protection against virus attacks. With zero downtime, the College has reduced its administration time by 20 percent and reduced e-mail-related helpdesk calls by 50 percent. Better spam control has helped the College reduce junk e-mail by 70 percent.

"Novell GroupWise was the right choice for us," said Leninger. "And Denmac's experience executing Exchange to GroupWise migrations made the transition go smoothly. We are already seeing great results. Stability, security and ease of administration all add up to a lower cost of ownership."