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Microsoft Exchange/Outlook Migration Delayed
By Maurice
Leatherbury, Ph.D.
Associate Vice President for Computing and Chief Technology Officer
UNT had planned to migrate
its faculty/staff e-mail system from Novell GroupWise to Microsoft’s
Exchange e-mail server and Outlook client starting in the summer of
2007 and finishing early in October. However, that migration has been
indefinitely postponed because of technical difficulties that the
Computing and Information Technology Center has experienced in
implementing Microsoft’s products.
A rather aggressive and optimistic schedule had
called for the Exchange and Active Directory (Microsoft’s required
directory service) servers to be operational by late July 2007.
Although Active Directory is essentially ready for production at this
time (August 20, 2007) a series of hardware and software tuning
issues has prevented the CITC from completing the Exchange server
rollout. Issues such as ascertaining just what performance metrics the
new servers had to meet, what settings of the storage
interface should be applied, and similar
highly detailed yet critical issues caused each stage of the setup of
Exchange to fall behind the original schedule.
Because the CITC has already announced two delays
in the rollout of Exchange, we don’t want to further inconvenience
UNT’s e-mail user community by giving another completion date of the
Exchange rollout that it may not meet because of continuing technical
difficulties. While the CITC is confident that it can and will get
Exchange running and that the Exchange/Outlook e-mail system will be
superior to GroupWise, the CITC has decided to get the new e-mail
system operational and fully tested before announcing a new
implementation date.
Faculty and staff will continue to use GroupWise,
which remains fully operational, until the Exchange service is
rolled-out.
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