Climbing the Microsoft mountain: deploying Microsoft solutions for directory services, email and calendar

In 2010, Ithaca College began making significant changes to the desktop environment. Over the course of three years and four different projects, we moved email, calendar, and directory services to Microsoft. This paper will discuss migrating our users from Novell to Active Directory, moving from a locally hosted email solution to Microsoft Live@edu, moving from Oracle Calendar to Microsoft Live@edu, and finally migrating email and calendar to Microsoft Office 365. Each project was unique in scope, involved a separate timeline and implementation schedule, and presented its own unique challenges. Some of the highlights of these projects include physically touching 4000 Macintosh and Windows computers as part of the Novell to Active Directory migration, determining what email clients to support for the Live email migration, and teaching 1500 users a new way to schedule and manage meetings during final exam week! Once all that was done, we still faced one final migration from Microsoft Live@edu to Microsoft Office 365. This paper will provide a high level overview of these projects, key policy and implementation decisions and lessons learned from a client services perspective.