Approximately 200 user departmental mailboxes and 4100 VoIP
mailboxes have been migrated to the central Exchange 2007
service.
There are currently 15 Independent Microsoft Exchange
email/calendaring systems deployed on campus. The primary goal of
this project is to consolidate these independent systems into
single comprehensive Exchange service offering. Messaging systems
such as Exchange are regarded as critical systems for normal
effective business operation. Therefore, Exchange service
implemented by this project team will be designed as a highly
reliable messaging system with built-in redundancy in order to meet
customer’s needs and business continuity objectives.
The current department based Exchange Service model provides
some server component fault-tolerance such as disk arrays &
redundant power supplies, but does not provide true “service
redundancy”. Consequently, a major system or site failure can
result in service outages lasting one to several days.
Consolidation of these departmental servers concentrates terabytes
of customer data in a single service. The scope of a service outage
therefore can affect thousands of customers. A business continuity
strategy consisting of multi-site redundant servers and data
storage is strongly recommended to reduce the risk and impact of a
server and data storage failures.
The demand for new messaging system features are continually
evolving such as the need for mobile access from a variety of
mobile devices as an efficient means of communication and
collaboration. The service created by this implementation project
will be designed to support Blackberry and MSMobile supported
devices.
In addition, this service will be designed to utilize an
enterprise message hygiene system currently being designed and
developed by Unix email team. This system when implemented will
help to control the massive amount of SPAM and virus laden messages
that currently clog UB’s messaging systems. The project team
will provide a requirements document to the Message Hygiene Team
that defines the specific needs of the Exchange Messaging System.
It may be necessary to implement an interim message hygiene
solution depending on the projected availability of the enterprise
service.
A customer needs assessment has been completed as part of the
initial steps of this project and will be used to guide the
implementation of this service to ensure customer needs and
expectation are met.
