Business Situation
The IT department at the University of Houston struggled to prepare the organization and its information workers for mobile capabilities, reliable access to calendars and email-based collaboration on an infrastructure that was becoming increasingly costly to maintain. The University’s Exchange 5.5 Server platform was costly to maintain and administration across many disparate servers was becoming a burden for the IT staff. Challenged with the task of selecting and transitioning from Exchange 5.5 to a new server and messaging platform, the University of Houston determined that consulting services were required from a vendor who possessed expert Microsoft product knowledge and an understanding of how that technology is best leveraged within a campus environment.

 

Solution
As one of only two universities invited to participate in Microsoft's Exchange Server 2003 Rapid Deployment Program (RDP), Avanade helped the University of Houston create a migration process from Exchange 5.5 to Exchange Server 2003. Avanade worked with University of Houston to design and deploy a highly scalable and reliable N+1 clustered Datacenter running on the new Windows Server 2003/Exchange Server 2003 environment while also providing mobile email capabilities for University staff via Pocket PC Phone Edition devices.

 

Results
The new platform will allow improved productivity for the IT department, reduced cost of ownership, and will also provide pervasive access to important business, educational, and research information for the University of Houston students and faculty members.

• Consolidation of servers results in less administration time and money

• Establishes a technology foundation for other services such as Voice Mail Service and mobile email capabilities