The Community College of Rhode Island wanted to give students the benefits of single sign on technology to provide easier access to online resources. The college also hoped to benefit from low-cost system maintenance. It achieved both by moving from the Sun iPlanet system for email to Microsoft Live@edu. Since migrating to Live@edu, the college has experienced a 50 percent increase in active email users, while its IT costs have declined by U.S.$285,000.

Business Needs
Call it the new math. The Community College of Rhode Island has 18,000 students plus 1,200 faculty members and administrators, yet the IT department has to manage 50,000 email accounts.

The math makes sense when you consider that the student population has high turnover. Students take one or more classes at a time, leave the college for a few years, and then come back to take additional classes. By including recent students who are likely to re-enroll, the number of email accounts rises to 50,000.

But what didn’t make sense was the way the college maintained those accounts. Students relied on a self-hosted Sun iPlanet email system that didn’t interoperate well with the Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 email messaging and collaboration software that faculty and staff use for their email, following their earlier migration from iPlanet. The Sun system also didn’t work well with the Active Directory Domain Services system, which could otherwise be used as a single sign on solution to help streamline student access to everything from email and class registration to curriculum materials.

Although students needed the school’s email system for class work and daily communications, few made significant use of it—only 5,000 accounts were active, and typical traffic seldom topped more than 1,000 messages a day.

The college had a long-term plan to migrate student accounts to Exchange Server. But increasing the size of the email deployment by nearly 25 times required more hardware, software, and maintenance. The overall rise in costs and maintenance work did not appeal to the college.

Solution
After four years of using iPlanet, the Community College of Rhode Island decided to migrate its student email accounts to a “cloud”-based email service—one that is hosted in an off-site data center and available over the Internet.

With Live@edu, we’ve gone from spending time and money on an email system that students didn’t use much, to saving money on a system that’s more useful. Stephen Vieira Chief Information Officer, Community College of Rhode Island

“We considered Google Apps,” says Stephen Vieira, Chief Information Officer at the Community College of Rhode Island. “But we wanted to educate students on the Microsoft software that they’ll encounter in the workforce, so it made no sense to provide that training, then send students off to use Google Apps as a campus mail system. Google didn’t offer much interoperability with the systems we already had. Also, we had concerns about security and about the added expense of features we needed, such as storage.”

Then Vieira and his colleagues discovered Microsoft Live@edu, the Microsoft cloud-based email service for students, faculty, and staff. It includes collaboration tools, such as blogging and instant messaging; 25 gigabytes (GB) of free online Windows Live SkyDrive storage; and Microsoft Office Web Apps, which provide access to Microsoft Office applications over the Internet. “When we saw Live@edu, we were enamored with it,” says Vieira.

The migration process went quickly and smoothly. The college tested the service for a week, then took four days to move all 50,000 accounts by using automated tools provided with Live@edu. The college sent advance word to campus computing labs, but training was minimal. “Our students already know how to use Microsoft-based email. They pretty much logged on to Live@edu and started using it.”

The college uses Live@edu together with a self-hosted deployment of Microsoft Identity Lifecycle Manager 2007 and Active Directory Domain Services so that students can access their email, the personalized student portal, and other applications by signing on to the system only once.

Benefits
The Community College of Rhode Island now has a student email system that is useful and popular, that participates in automated account creation and management across systems, and that saves the school 24 percent of its U.S.$1.2 million IT budget.

Active Users, Mail Volume, Climb by 50 Percent
Microsoft Live@edu is immensely popular with students, who now have access to blogging, instant messaging, 25 GB of online storage, and online versions of the same Microsoft Office applications used by more than 500 million people worldwide. As a result, students use Live@edu more frequently than they used iPlanet. In the first two weeks after the migration to Live@edu, the number of active users climbed by 50 percent to 15,000. Daily email volume also climbed by 50 percent.

“With Live@edu, we’ve gone from spending time and money on an email system that students didn’t use much, to saving money on a system that’s more useful,” says Vieira. “And we don’t pay more for higher mail volumes.”

Systemwide Account Creation, Maintenance Now Automated
By including student email in a single-directory infrastructure that also supports registration, course curriculum, and automated password synchronization, the college achieves more than just a single sign on solution.

“Creating student accounts doesn’t require much effort or thought now,” says Vieira. “It’s automated. Students get all of their accounts, including email, within five minutes of being accepted at the college—instead of the next day. When they need to update passwords or change personal information, it happens once and is automatically updated throughout our systems. Maintaining student accounts is so easy—and that wouldn’t have been possible with Google Apps.”

TCO Drops by 24 Percent, to $285,000
The college has saved $285,000 of the total cost of ownership (TCO) for student email—24 percent of its $1.2 million IT budget—by moving from iPlanet to Live@edu. The savings come from eliminating expenses such as hardware purchases, software licensing, and system monitoring. Also, the IT team requires less time to manage, create, and delete accounts; maintain hardware; and perform and confirm regular system backups.

“We’re rolling out technology-enhanced classrooms throughout the campus,” says Vieira. “The time and money we save with Live@edu is being reinvested into helping to make this possible.”

For more information about other Microsoft customer successes, please visit:
www.microsoft.com/casestudies