U Guelph Moving E-Mail into Public Cloud

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 02/28/11

An Ontario university will be migrating its internally hosted e-mail system to a public cloud. The University of Guelph will be moving Gryph Mail, its Zimbra-based collaboration software, to a cloud-based service hosted by Scalar Decisions. Scalar has been working with the institution since 2007, when the university adopted Zimbra Collaboration Server in the first place. The migration work encompasses 60,000 mailboxes.

The university told users that e-mail quotas will increase to 8 GB from 1 GB and that they should find the transition smooth, aside from "some very brief individual service outages."

"We are moving to a hosted model to enhance service, further capitalize on cost savings and efficiencies and to benefit from the increased availability and security that cloud deployment offers," explained Deputy CIO Bo Wandschneider. "The move to Scalar Managed Zimbra is a natural step in our evolution. It not only puts us on a par with leading universities around the world, it strengthens our commitment to improve the student and faculty experience while at the same time introducing significant cost savings and service efficiencies."

CIO Mike Ridley added, "This will provide us with an opportunity to continue to grow and expand our collaborative services and maintain the security of knowing that our data is highly secure, fully encrypted, and offering the level of confidentiality our community demands."

Zimbra was acquired by VMware in 2010. Gryph Mail Service, the university's branded version of that application, features e-mail, calendaring, contact management, documentation creation, file sharing, and mobile access. Scalar Decisions is a Toronto-based IT solutions integrator.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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