First Australian Google University

Macquarie University, is home to approximately 35,000 students and 5,500 members of staff. The beautiful 126 hectare of park-like campus is an ideal setting for discovery and learning. Located within the high-technology corridor of Sydney’s north-west, Macquarie University graduates are highly sought-after. Macquarie University is one of Australia’s leading research universities, it is a dynamic, flexible and engaged university committed to excellence in research, teaching and global citizenship. Formed in 1964, the University prides itself on being enquiring, open to new ideas, new ways of thinking and new ways of ensuring a sustainable institution.

Business Need

Macquarie University have been providing a number of email systems for staff with the main system being a Novell GroupWise system. The GroupWise setup catered for approximately 80% of staff with the remaining 20% on a variety of other systems and provided email service to staff since 2005. With approximately 5,500 users, the Novell GroupWise system spanned over 29 GroupWise Post Offices. Beneath this impressive email infrastructure ran a well managed 8 Node Novell NetWare cluster.

In 2007 Macquarie University migrated the entire student body over to Google Apps for Education. With staff and lectures on GroupWise and students using Google Apps, managing multiple systems became a very costly undertaking.

“The main issue for Macquarie University was to remove the costs and complexity of managing multiple email systems and to consolidate on one system” – Norbert Attard, Technology Project Leader at Macquarie University

Solution

With a large student user base already happy on Google Apps, the choice was obvious. Macquarie University decided to migrate away from Novell GroupWise to Google Apps for it’s staff users.

Marc Bailey CIO at Macquarie University says:

“Success at cloud-sourcing email depends entirely on two factors beyond feature/benefits, namely out-of-box experience and consumer confidence. Cloud Technology Solutions delivered Macquarie University the best possible impression of our new system from the very first customer click. Combined with a great project team, some intense planning, training and communication, we were able to engender the confidence needed to rapidly reach an adoption tipping point, then smoothly proceed to completion”

Migrating staff would have been an extremely complex process as the users all took advantage of calendars and scheduling, along with maintaining contact information within the GroupWise address book. The University did not have the option to simply move to a different email system, as it did with students, it needed to migrate everything, email, calendar, chat and contacts.

Cloud Technology Solutions

Cloud Technology Solutions were the migration partner of choice to provide assistance and support with the Cloud Google Migrator, the market-leading migration tool widely used to migrate organisations to Google Apps from Novell GroupWise. The tool allows entire organisations of any size to migrate to Google Apps efficiently and with no downtime. As the Cloud Google Migrator had proven ability to migrate to Google Apps and supported email, calendar and contacts, it was a perfect match for the Universities requirements.

The migration was smooth and efficient. Simultaneously running the migration tool on 8 Dual Core 4GB workstations, Macquarie University seamlessly migrated all 5,500 users from Novell GroupWise to Google Apps for Education over the course of a few weeks and with no data loss.

“Cloud Technology Solutions were invaluable in helping us migrate our staff to Google Apps. The migration tool itself was excellent and meant we reduced our migration time by about 30%. Where any problems did arise the support response was first class”

Benefits

Currently 8 million students, faculty and staff at educational institutions around the world are using Google Apps, so Macquarie University are not alone.

Google Apps for Education now provides the entire campus community, including students, faculty, staff and alumni all the tools they need to communicate and collaborate more effectively. Providing over 7GB of email storage per student, Google Apps for Education delivers all the email and collaboration needs of Macquarie University.

“Cloud Technology Solutions Google Migrator allows organisations to seamlessly and easily migrate legacy email platforms to Google Apps significantly reducing the cost of running an IT department” – Steve Kaye, CEO, Cloud Technology Solutions

To learn more about how we can help your organisation Go Google, please contact us now.

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