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Background
Deer Park ISD is known throughout the State of Texas for its quality instructional program, outstanding facilities and exemplary teaching and support staff. The District’s first school opened in 1930 in the small community of Deer Park, located in east Harris County. Today, the district is comprised of 15 schools and several support buildings, and enrollment has grown to 12,400 students. Deer Park ISD has 1817 employees that include teachers and other staff.
The Challenge: Efficiently Optimizing the Deer Park ISD IT Infrastructure
At the beginning of 2009, Deer Park ISD decided to roll out a new financial and a new student system, both of which leveraged Microsoft Active Directory. The School District, which until then had been using Novell eDirectory, made the decision to optimize their IT infrastructure and standardize on Windows rather than continue to support a hybrid Novell and Microsoft environment.
Jason Piazza, Director of Network Systems at Deer Park ISD, explains the rationale behind the changes needed to their IT infrastructure: "The decision to standardize on Windows was made with both financial and support considerations in mind. We had to implement Active Directory for the new financial and student systems. The question that remained was whether to keep on supporting Novell eDirectory, as well."
Maintaining two separate directory services systems didn’t make much sense, as it would require additional work from the IT department. Moreover, as Netware was also at end of life and would have to be replaced by OES, keeping the Novell environment meant retraining the IT staff on Linux. "At the same time, most of my staff was already trained and very familiar with the Windows operating system. Thus, the decision to eliminate the Novell environment made sense from both a support standpoint and a financial standpoint," says Piazza.
As part of this streamlining of IT operations, Deer Park ISD also undertook a migration of its GroupWise collaboration system to Exchange. For years now, email has been a primary method of communication between parents and teachers at the school district.
"After we made the decision to migrate from GroupWise to Exchange, we set on the summer break as the ideal period to carry out the project," continues Piazza. "I had prior experience with doing a migration from GroupWise to Exchange, one of my technical analysts had some experience with Exchange, and we were aware of the steps needed to execute on the project efficiently and within the allotted time frame."
What Piazza didn’t want to do was introduce unnecessary complexity to the project by setting up co-existence between GroupWise and Exchange. His goal was to use the summer break, migrate all his users and transfer the data onto the new Exchange platform. "In the previous migrations we used the Microsoft migration tool that came with Exchange 2000 and we experienced so many integration and mail delivery issues, not to mention the nightmare of keeping the address books on both systems updated, that I wanted to avoid co-existence at all cost on this project."
The other challenge Piazza planned on solving during the migration was email archiving. With the rising popularity of email as a means of communication, the school district’s email message store was growing. The exchanges between parents and teachers had to be preserved as official electronic records. As Deer Park ISD did not have an archiving solution in place, the migration to Exchange presented a good opportunity to simultaneously tackle the email retention requirement and thus address the critical eDiscovery and compliance mandates.
Effective Migration to Exchange and a Solution to Long-Term Email Archiving with M+Archive
The Deer Park ISD Technology Department considered available migration options. "We looked at the Quest tool but they quoted us an astronomical price for an application we'd use once and didn’t include any services," continues Piazza. None of the other products they researched had been used in organizations comparable to Deer Park ISD’s size. "I wanted to make sure I was looking at relatively equivalent environments when I was doing the evaluation."
The selection of Messaging Architects' M+Archive was made based on technology and cost considerations. M+Archive offered the migration piece at no additional cost, solved the email archiving requirement, and also included the migration and archiving deployment. "Basically, M+Archive enabled us to complete the migration and archiving projects at the same time. What was really valuable was that the purchase of M+Archive also included the services for the migration and archiving implementation," comments Piazza.
Deer Park ISD IT staff completed the entire migration from Novell to Windows over the summer months – moving users and objects to Active Directory, setting up the file shares and shifting over all other applications on Windows servers. The Messaging Architects' professional services team was doing the M+Archive implementation simultaneously. According to Piazza, "Because the Messaging Architects' engineers performed the heavy lifting of the email migration, we were able to complete the entire project with time to spare and were ready to go for the first day of school. When back to school time came, email users were able to start their Outlook clients and have immediate access to their email.
"Another thing I found to be a real benefit was the fact that the services team was willing to do a lot of the work on the migration and archiving implementation remotely after the initial on-site visit. I gave them VPN access, they connected and did what they needed to do remotely. Given all the other things we were working on at the time, the remote sessions saved my internal IT staff valuable time from having to shadow them in the data center and also allowed me the flexibility to do things when and where I needed to do them."
From an architectural perspective, Deer Park ISD took the following steps in approaching the email migration. First, they used M+Archive to archive the majority of email data contained in their old GroupWise system in a centralized SAN-based archive repository. Second, they used the M+Archive Migration utility to inject a year’s worth of email data into the new Exchange system, anticipating the needs of teachers and administrative staff. For Piazza, "Being able to first pull the majority of the old GroupWise data into the archive and only inject a year’s worth of it into the Exchange system helped us a lot in terms of speed. We didn’t have to migrate emails that would rarely or never be accessed, but they are still available to users, should they require them. This approach also helps with the performance of our Exchange system."
The M+Archive implementation also took care of the eDiscovery and compliance issues. Having an automated, policy-based email retention solution eliminated possible risks related to electronic discovery or open records requests. Email is preserved for a period of seven years in line with the State of Texas guidelines. "Teachers are supposed to preserve all their communication with parents. M+Archive does it for them without requiring their intervention and protects them from accidental deletions," says Piazza.
Since the beginning of the 2009 school year, M+Archive has continued to archive email messages from the Exchange server. Because M+Archive stores email messages in a standards-based, non-proprietary format, employees have seamless access to both their old GroupWise and their Exchange archives directly from their new Outlook WebAccess client.
According to Deer Park ISD's Director of Network Services, one of the advantages of working with Messaging Architects was that it was easier doing business with a smaller company. "Some of the monster technology companies can be a real hassle to work with, because unless you're buying millions of dollars' worth of products, you're not really important for them. Working with Messaging Architects was really a benefit to us because we felt taken care of. Any time I did have issues or questions, I was able to get in touch with someone at the organization and get the concerns ironed out or the issues taken care of. There was definitely a personal touch.
"We always had access to engineers who were very knowledgeable on email management and archiving issues. I liked the training at the end that provided additional insights and free advice on the Exchange management that were beyond the scope of the migration project. And I appreciated the suggestions from the Messaging Architects Exchange expert on fine-tuning our system. It’s not something you often get from the large software vendors."
The Bottom Line: A Successful Migration in Record Time
The summer migration project was an unqualified success for Deer Park ISD. Quite a few people expressed their satisfaction at how well the entire migration to Windows and Exchange had gone. "We did a lot this summer. And quite a few people came forward and told us this was probably the smoothest start of school from a technology perspective that any of them can remember. This recognition certainly made me proud of the work that we did. The migration service we got from Messaging Architects was definitely a part of our success. The migration team enabled the email platform migration to take place and freed up our time to take care of the other IT operations on our to-do list," concludes Piazza.
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