QUT learning the value of Microsoft's 2007 vision
Early success with a pilot test of Microsoft Exchange 2007 has convinced IT staff at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) to accelerate plans for a full rollout that will eventually expand to include Windows Vista and Office System 2007.
QUT adopted Exchange 2007 after an initial pilot test of its predecessor Exchange 2003, which began in late 2005 with around 150 staff inside the university's Faculty of Information Technology. The initial pilot test was designed to help QUT unify its various collaboration and communications systems. However, QUT had to go back to the drawing board after Microsoft's beta program for Exchange 2007 was introduced before the pilot had been completed.
"It seemed silly to go to Exchange 2003 and then, shortly afterward, to 2007," says Graham Keys, director of infrastructure services with the Faculty of IT. That faculty has long enjoyed executive sanction as a university-wide driver of workforce innovation, and was therefore given significant flexibility in upgrading its applications.
As part of QUT's involvement in Microsoft's Rapid Deployment Program, the university was able to conduct a pilot test of Exchange 2007. Its success has led to a migration that will eventually reach 6,000 staff and pave the way for a broader rollout of Windows Vista and Office System 2007.
The implementation of Exchange 2007, which remains QUT's priority for the near term and will continue over the next two months, replaces a mixture of best-of-breed e-mail, calendaring, directory services and other applications.
Those applications, Keys said, were doing the trick in the past but had become increasingly constraining as the university sought to improve collaboration capabilities between its employees.
"When you start moving into collaborative environments, you find some of those decisions tend to impose road blocks," he said of the decision to cut with the past.
"They're discrete systems that we saw as best-of-breed at the time, but if we had continued with the existing infrastructure we would have had to do some major work in having them integrated. Doing that in an integrated way is much easier if it's provided by a vendor in a seamless solution."
What's the business case?
With 38,000 students and 6000 staff potentially involved, the full rollout of Exchange 2007 -- followed by an extensive Office System 2007 implementation and potential Windows Vista deployment next year -- would make QUT a major Australian reference site for Microsoft's new collaboration-heavy application strategy.
That strategy has been questioned by many observers, who believe the high cost of Office System 2007 and Vista will drive companies to put off significant investment decisions until the business cases for the new platforms are clear.
A recent survey of CIOs conducted by ZDNet Australia, which revealed that many organisations were not in a hurry to rollout Vista, echoed the observations of industry observers.
This could turn the traditional migration cycle -- Windows, then Office, then related server technologies -- on its head, said Tony Wilkinson, director of Microsoft's Information Worker business group.
"Our focus [with the Office products] isn't on personal productivity anymore; we're really looking to address organisational productivity," he said. "We started down this track in 2003 by putting all the building blocks out, but it required a certain amount of development to get there.
Now that the level of abstraction is much higher, you don't have to get down into the plumbing as you used to -- and we think that's going to drive a faster ROI with this release than previous releases."