Coventry University is replacing its ageing Novell Netware infrastructure with Microsoft products in a £500,000 deal which will also boost the technical skills of its IT staff.
The tech upgrade will give the university's 18,000 students and staff access to shared online calendars and diaries. It will provide faster log-in for users and greater levels of resilience, and puts in place the infrastructure to support single sign-on and remote working by staff and students.
The university is also looking to integrate its student records system with the directory so that when new students or staff join, they are automatically added to the system.
Colin Bruce, IT manager at Coventry University, explained that the existing infrastructure was limited the choice of software available to departments. "It was felt that we were being constrained by the Netware environment," he said.
The university is migrating from Novell Netware to Windows Active Directory and Exchange 2003, with assistance from Lynx Technology, which is providing the university's IT department with consulting and transition management.
The rollout is expected to be completed by the end of August and will be carried out across the university's 4,500 PCs and eventually up to 45 new IBM servers.
The old and new systems will run in parallel for two to three months, after which time the Netware infrastructure will be switched off.
To implement the system the university had to build its Microsoft skills almost from scratch, according to Bruce. "We had no Windows experience at all - people used it on the desktop but that was about it," he said.
In January and February this year around 15 staff attended Microsoft courses arranged by SkillSolve to learn about implementing the system, and then built test environments to help inform its designs.
Bruce was keen for staff to get hands-on with the project and not leave it to the consultants. "We are doing a lot of the work ourselves," he told silicon.com.
He explained: "One of the things we were worried about was that if we [relied entirely on consultants] at the end of the project we would be left with a service that we couldn't run and would have to call them back again if we had problems."
Rather than just sending staff to training courses, Bruce was keen that they got involved with the development as well. "It concentrates the mind if they are faced with a couple of servers and a Microsoft Exchange disk," he said.
Comments
There are 4 comments. Join the discussion
1. John McKean
Coventry has just increased their operating expenses by and order of magnitude. Had they embraced Novell's OES product and leveraged SUSE 9.3 Linux on both the servers and the desktops they could have been inovaters instead of sheep blindly following the pied piper to the edge of the cliff.
Sigh...
2. James Romer
Another example of poor misguided IT management.
Novell have the best products as we know but all too often IT managers take the "safe" option, as you do not get fired for choosing Microsoft. You do however increase operating and admin costs, and lower your ability to adapt to techinical changes within the IT world. This IT manager really needs to think long and hard about limiting a large educational university to one supplier. Surely educational innstitutions should be embracing open source.
As for Lynx consultants, any technical consultants who are "recommending" inferior products are clearly only in it to take the money and do not care about the solution.
Linux is providing some of the most innovative and exciting changes to the NOS framework for a long time, and coupled with the best directory services solution, messaging suite collabaration and desktop management products to name but a few, Novell have the best solution by far.
I wish Coventry Uni luck, they will certainly need it. I hope they quickly realise the mistake they are making.
3. Matthew Glunn
Coventry Uni have made a huge mistake. What an awful decision by any IT manager in todays climate.
MS solutions are a backwards step.
4. Dave King
This IT manager is a grade A idiot.
Lets throw money down the drain and move away from the most secure robust and mature directory services solution and tie ourselves into the security hell that is Microsoft.
great idea.. well done. Lets hope they dont want to cluster more than 8 nodes.... Of course they could have clustered 32 nodes had they stuck with Netware or migrated to Linux. When will people learn that MS solutions are bad!