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Smooth Transition to MeritMailFebruary 23, 2009By Brian Warkoczeski ANN ARBOR, MI - Since the release of the robust MeritMail service, powered by Zimbra, demand for the powerful, hosted email service has steadily grown. With over 280,000 email accounts currently in service for Member organizations, Brad Robertson, information technology director for Merit Network, and his team of administrators have successfully implemented MeritMail for Michigan Technological University (MTU), Eastern Michigan University (EMU), Cleary University, and other higher education and non-profit institutions. While large-scale email migrations have been known to take over a year when universities have implemented non-MeritMail email solutions, Merit's technical staff has made timely email transitions, which has been a priority for MeritMail subscribers. Merit's email transition team has reduced the switchover time to months through continual communication, project coordination, and efficient processes. "We've been very aggressive with our timelines," said Robertson. "We work very hard to coordinate deadlines and then meet those deadlines for an email switchover." MeritMail's unlimited email storage, shared calendaring, collaborative document features, and mobile support are perfect for a university community with many types of email users—faculty, staff, full-time students, part-time students, and alumni. Large universities can present a challenge for an email switchover when you are dealing with thousands of email accounts. Merit's staff has extensive experience migrating email accounts from various platforms to MeritMail. For example, MTU had over 1.6 terabytes of stored email and over 20,000 email accounts that switched over to MeritMail in October 2008. A week later, Merit successfully moved over 50,000 email accounts for EMU to MeritMail. When a switchover for a large university occurs, Merit's IT team and Member Relations team work collaboratively with university personnel to create a project plan, establish milestones, and formalize the steps that are needed during the process. "Merit meets weekly with the the university's transition team to discuss any issues that may arise and to discuss the project's progress," according to Leslie Williamson, governing member relations manager at Merit Network. "Our Member Relations staff also trains campus IT staff and help desk personnel in supporting MeritMail with 'train the trainer' seminars." When the time comes to move from the old email system to MeritMail, the change can be accomplished using several different methods. "There are different ways to move people over from their existing email system to MeritMail," according to Robertson, "but in every case we start by taking increasingly frequent snapshots of the legacy system and importing the data into MeritMail. Generally, at cut-over time, user access to the old system is disabled, a final snapshot of the old system is made to capture any last-minute changes or late email arrivals, and then end-user access to MeritMail is enabled. The final cut-over for MTU was begun on a Friday and wrapped up over the weekend, and the final migration phase for EMU was performed one week later, also starting on a Friday and finishing over the weekend." MeritMail's functionality is what impressed Connie Schaffer, EMU's Interim CIO, and members of her email selection team. "We first asked our committee to identify e-mail services that were highly reliable, secure, and scalable. Then we asked them to identify those solutions that facilitated collaboration not just communication. MeritMail stood out—it is truly a collaboration suite. In higher education, collaborating is what we're all about. There aren't many articles, proposals or projects that are completed by one individual—they're typically done with others." "In addition, MeritMail does a great job of integrating applications within the application. For example, the calendar and email functions are seamlessly integrated," Schaffer said. For MTU, the growing cost of maintaining the university's in-house email solution and the need for a more robust email service led to the move to MeritMail. "We were interested in addressing several key issues with the same solution," said Walter Milligan, CIO at Michigan Tech. "First, our home-built e-mail system was becoming very expensive to maintain, with a dated web interface. Second, our students were demanding a robust calendaring product that they could share with the faculty, and our legacy calendar product for the faculty and staff was reaching its end of life decision." "Most students have personal GMail accounts, so they were looking for an integrated calendar and e-mail product similar to GMail. We found that the MeritMail solution based on Zimbra was superior to GMail, and Merit was able to offer a competitive pricing structure due to economies of scale. So we were able to outsource our entire e-mail system, and we got an enterprise-ready calendar and scheduling product in the bargain for free." "We also feel very comfortable using Merit as the host for these services, because they are already a trusted partner," Milligan said. "Further, we own the data, and we know where it lives." Merit Network is in the process of transitioning Wayne State University and Macomb Community College from their old email systems to MeritMail. About Merit NetworkMerit Network, Inc., a non-profit corporation governed by Michigan's public universities, owns and operates America's longest-running regional research and education network. Founded in 1966, Merit supports the high-performance networking needs of Michigan's universities, colleges, K-12 schools, libraries, state government, healthcare, and other non-profit organizations. Through Merit, Michigan's research and education organizations have access to leading-edge network research, state and national collaborative initiatives and international peering. www.merit.eduFor press/media contact: Elwood Downing Merit Network, Inc. Phone: (734)527-5702 Email: Go to the Merit Network News Archive. |
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