Oakland University Overhauls Its E-Mail System

E-mail may not have been around as long as traditional mail, but try communicating rapidly without e-mail in today's global village and you'll find yourself moving at a snail's pace. Colleges and universities have come to greatly depend on e-mail as a critical communications tool for research, teaching and day-to-day business operations. E-mail has become part and parcel of the mission for most modern educational institutions, from Ivy League schools to local community colleges. Its use in higher education has grown exponentially over the years, and as enrollment continues to increase and business processes become more streamlined, e-mail is becoming more a necessity than a luxury. With education budgets continuing to suffer, universities are turning more to e-mail as a cost-reduction tool--saving them the high price of communicating with students and alumni using traditional paper mailings. Capacity Limitations As some universities outgrow their e-mail systems--suffering from capacity overload or experiencing service outages, hardware failures and security issues--others are discovering the benefits of upgrading or overhauling their systems. In March 2003, Oakland University made the transition to a new e-mail system, and things haven't been the same since. Problems of the past are now gone: poor performance, overtaxed system resources, antiquated user customization and unreliability among other problems. With more than 16,000 students, Oakland University in Rochester, Mich., had outgrown its old system, which used core technology that had not been changed during the last eight years. The hardware included a Compaq AlphaServer DS20 mail server, a Sun Enterprise 450 Web server and a RAID Cobra3 storage system. The university's needs had outstripped the capabilities of this outdated architecture, which, designed in the early 1990s, was sufficient in its day. Some hardware and software upgrades over the years were made, but parts of the environment's technology, including file structures, still dated back more than 20 years. Significant capacity limitations affected operations, including the number of e-mail accounts, the size of the accounts and the number of messages the system could process. A single storage system operated as the hub of the e-mail operation. Large mailboxes consumed system resources, which slowed down the entire system. Concurrently, heavy fragmentation of the mail storage pool added to the system's unreliability. Downtime and other problems eventually caused havoc, leading up to the system experiencing a second full e-mail failure in October 2002, which resulted in the loss of all e-mail inboxes. This outage was the last straw, proving that something had to be done. A technical decision to upgrade was made within a month, and after approval by the state-appointed board of trustees in February 2003, a new system was installed in March. User-Friendly System The university's new system, provided by Mirapoint Inc. (www.mirapoint.com) and its reseller partner The Newman Group (www.newman.com), is faster and sleeker, provides more than three times the storage capacity--144 GB of data compared to 40 GB on the old system--and has none of the problems associated with the university's former architecture. The new system also easily handles 28,000 clients with the ability to scale to a larger solution in the future. In addition, because security and authenticated use is a very real and important concern in the Oakland environment, virus protection, which was previously managed at the desktop, is now controlled at the e-mail gateway, with a directory services system included in the system. …