ARCHIVED: Completed project: Exchange 2013 upgrade

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Primary UITS contact: Abhi Jalan, Campus Communications Infrastructure

Completed: September 30, 2015

Description: The Exchange environment at Indiana University consists of over 65,000 mailboxes, which collectively sent and received over half a billion messages last year. Exchange users on average send and receive 55 email messages per day. Even with a multitude of communication options available to faculty and staff at IU today, email remains the preferred communication medium for most users. Several University services, business processes, and organizational workflows are dependent on reliable email service for continued operations. Additionally, Exchange will soon become the only remaining on-premises email service for the entire university.

The existing Exchange environment was put in place in January 2010 and is past its four-year lifecycle. Given the dependence on email for university operations, it is necessary that the Exchange environment be upgraded to allow the service to continue to operate in a reliable manner. The upgrade will allow IU to enhance the overall user experience for the Exchange service by taking advantage of improvements in server and storage technologies, as well as the new functionality introduced in Exchange 2013.

Outcome: The goal of the project is to improve the experience of users accessing the Exchange environment by upgrading to Exchange 2013. The new features in Exchange 2013 assist users and teams as work habits evolve from a communication focus to a collaboration focus.

Milestones and status:

  • Fall 2014:
    • Submit RFQ to vendors Completed
    • Submit Exchange 2013 Upgrade proposal Completed
    • Exchange 2013 Upgrade is approved Completed
    • Place order for Exchange 2013 hardware Completed
    • Receive Exchange 2013 hardware Completed
    • Install Exchange 2013 Servers in IUDC & ICTC Completed
  • January 2015: Build test Exchange 2013 environment Completed
  • February 2015: Build production Exchange 2013 environment Completed
  • March 2015: Begin testing access via Exchange 2013 servers Completed
  • April 2015: Change DNS records to point to Exchange 2013 Servers Completed
  • May 2015: Begin mailbox migration to Exchange 2013 for pilot users Completed
  • July 2015: Begin mailbox migration to Exchange 2013 for all users Completed
  • September 2015:
    • Begin public folder migration Completed
    • Decommission Exchange 2010 servers and cleanup Completed

Benefits:

  • Virtually unlimited quotas: Users will no longer have to worry about email quotas.
  • Improved disaster recovery and high availability: The new Exchange environment is split between the Bloomington and Indianapolis Data Centers and access to email will be available even if one of the Data Centers goes offline.
  • New Outlook Web App UI: Outlook Web App emphasizes a streamlined user interface that also supports the use of touch, enhancing the mobile device experience with Exchange.
  • Integrate with SharePoint and Lync: Exchange 2013 offers greater integration with SharePoint 2013 and Lync 2013 through site mailboxes and In-Place eDiscovery.

Primary clients: IU faculty and staff

Project team:

  • UITS Campus Communications Infrastructure
  • UITS Support Center Tier 2

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Last modified on 2018-01-18 17:33:23.