1. e-mail & Storage in the Cloud
Case Study

2. 2
Case Study
Key Drivers
■ Limitations on server capacity.
■ Limitations of buildings.
■ 24/7 demand for storage.
■ Demand for access on mobile
devices.
■ Need to integrate information
systems.
■ Flexible capacity.
■ of contact after students leave
the College.
Intended Beneficiaries
Students Staff
Colleges and Projects
Accrington Rossendale Office 365 roll out - Lancashire Colleges Shared Services
Partnership
East Riding College Office 365 Cloud
Exeter College Student Storage and Collaboration in the Cloud
Grimsby Institute GIFHE Zone
Hartlepool College Email in the Cloud
Highbury College Cloud Computing Project
Northampton Phase 2 Office 365 Student Migration Project
North East Worcestershire College Using Software as service to deliver cloud based email and
office tools
Reaseheath College Office 365 Project
Xaverian College Migration to Office 365 from a Novell delivered application
and mail system
Summary
This set of projects is concerned with a number of ways of moving College e-mail and storage to the
Cloud. This has been achieved largely by the use of Microsoft 365 or Google Mail. One of these projects
achieved this through sharing e-mail and storage cloud services within a group of Colleges. A number
of these projects also used Microsoft 365 and Google Apps to make applications available through the
Cloud. Another project is progressively integrating the college’s IT infrastructure with that of a Cloud
Provider.

3. 3
Case Study
Impact to date and anticipated
The impact of these projects includes continuity of access to e-mail and storage by students and staff on
a wide range of College, home and mobile devices and the ability to allocate appropriate levels of data
storage to students and staff. Another feature is the enabling of document sharing and single sign on,
which will facilitate collaborative working. All of this should contribute to increased student and staff
productivity.
Accrington and Rossendale College: “A collaborative procurement project to migrate from traditional,
low capacity, on-premise email and storage provision to the Office 365 cloud delivered platform.
Office 365 gives our learners the resources that we couldn’t have provided economically prior to the
implementation – more storage capacity in the cloud and the ability to access their data from anywhere
and on mobile devices. Losing their work on pen drives that go astray is a thing of the past!”
Supplier engagement experiences
Exeter College: “Faced with ever-increasing demand for storage and access to productivity applications
and data, anytime, anyplace, this project aims to ensure students' expectations are met without the need
to add further hardware in-house. The College datacentres are at capacity and it is hoped that this project
will mark the beginning of a process of moving a significant proportion of the College's systems to cloud
- hosted environments. In turn we anticipate improved business efficiency and user experience.”
Grimsby Institute: “Student e-mail is now swapped to GOOGLE mail. This opens up other GOOGLE
apps for students to use - such as GOOGLE docs etc. This swap will allow easier students access to
e-mail on their own devices. The adoption of Google Mail and Google Apps has gone really well. We are
currently averaging around 350 unique users of the system daily. To facilitate our cloud desktop, a new
e-mail system was set up for our learners. Google Mail also allows access to Google Apps – giving our
learners access to feature-rich collaboration tools – all hosted in the cloud. At present we have 16,000
accounts on Google, averaging around 1300 logons per day”.
North East Worcestershire College “Cloud based email storage. This will allow us to remove our
exchange server and reduce the amount of space and time taken up with email backups, as Google
Vault will essentially replace our email backup procedure. This will see an estimated reduction of
600GB and reduce the nightly backup time by around 2 hours. Cloud based document storage has
allowed staff to upload, create and share documents with 5GB storage. The real advantages here
have been seen in the ability to create and edit documents on mobile devices and the ability to
share documents with others, including students, allowing for paperless assignment feedback and
submission, inside and out of our VLE
cloud based email storage. Single sign on – this has allowed staff and students access to over 40
resources, not just the cloud based storage and email. This has reduced the amount of training required
to access resources and removed some of the pressure of LRC staff in helping users locate usernames and
passwords for the various tools.”

4. 4
Case Study
Xaverian College “Mail is now managed by a third party with guaranteed 99.9% up time, something that
the College would never have been able to guarantee. Together with additional functionality, including
calendars and shared contacts, the College is now in a position to share information internally in a much
more efficient manner. The ease with which the Office 365 system can be added to users own devices
(including tablets and other mobile devices) has born immediate fruit with College managers of all
levels receiving information on the go and not having to log on to a work station to identify issues to be
dealt with”.
Supplier engagement experiences
Common themes which have emerged here are difficulties caused by the timing of the discontinuing of Microsoft’s
Live@edu and implementation challenges with Microsoft 365. Another challenge was upgrading band width
through JANET where required. Colleges stressed that time should be allowed for evaluation of alternative
approaches.
Hartlepool College: “A number of suppliers have demonstrated both Google apps and Microsoft 365 to members
of the Executive and ILT policy committee and a month long evaluations of Google and 365 has taken place. A
sample group of students provided their feedback on their preferences. Quotes have been received and evaluated.
A sample group of students were interviewed as to their preference. The vast majority preferred Microsoft 365 to
Google. The evaluation period has taken longer than originally intended, this was due to the number of suppliers
involved and problems with meetings being delayed/postponed due to staff/suppliers availability etc.”.
Northampton College: “We followed the procedures recommended by Microsoft to set up Live@Edu and some test
accounts. These worked well. They were reasonably simple to access and had 10GB of mail and 25GB of document
storage and access to Microsoft Office Apps on line.
Microsoft then decided to discontinue Live@Edu and replace it with Office365 instead. We were advised by
Microsoft to discontinue the existing setup and start again. The changeover to Office 365 involved the creation of 5
new authentication servers, a great deal of technical time and much interaction with Microsoft, which was not an
easy process. Microsoft then also changed the storage quotas to 500MB of SharePoint storage instead of 25GB of
normal on-line storage”.
North East Worcestershire College: “Using the JISC Community of practice helped find a supplier based on
recommendations and real life project work completed”.
Technical and Security Challenges
East Riding College:” The functionality of Office365 does not offer a straightforward interface to Web Apps and on-
line storage. Until Office365 can provide this, we are promoting the use of Microsoft SkyDrive through our LRC’s.
Firewall and web filter configurations have been modified to support this”.
Highbury College;” It is believed that all data cannot be put into the cloud due to it being seen as single point of
failure, size of data and security risk. It is also believed that organisation data centres could put up costs and lead
to vendor lock in”.
Xaverian College: “The complexities of an individual institution’s systems cannot be fully catered for in third party
software documentation. Assumptions that ‘it should work’ on key operational systems does not mitigate risk. The
College wasted valuable ‘summer holiday’ time rectifying a possibly avoidable situation of system failure.”

5. 5
Case Study
Change Management experience
Common themes which have emerged here are difficulties caused by the timing of the discontinuing of Microsoft’s
Change management experiences included the challenge of maintaining e-mail access for learners whilst
their accounts are migrated to the Cloud and the need for user training.
Accrington and Rossendale College: “There was an issue in going live during term time. The migration
process can take a number of days, and during this time students will have no email access. This,
however, took place over the half-term holiday period to minimise the impact. Due to the complexities
and logistics of operating as a consortium of four individual colleges, some of our ability to react quickly
to the creation and agreement of tender documents is sacrificed. In future projects, we would aim to
consolidate this process into a much tighter time frame, leaving more time after supplier appointment to
effectively plan and deliver the solution”.
North East Worcestershire College:” Change management was done through a series of pilot groups
focusing on different features of the product. These pilot groups’ information was then shared with
the whole organisation to allow all to see the pros and cons of each tool. This was also then linked to
training and support materials on these. Issues around staff change - staff were initially wary of using
a cloud based service to host files and were worried about issues of access - could they get them all
the time etc.? Issues around training - initially we did Google apps training as one thing but realised
quickly that we had to break down each individual element and work on supporting staff on each
element of the app family”.
Reaseheath College:” The change management aspects were mostly transparent to the end user. The main
change process was carried out of a term break which allowed us to issue training and guides for use”.
Return on Investment
Whilst some colleges regard it as too early to identify savings, a significant proportion have identified
specific and general savings in items such as exchange servers, associated licences and considerable
technical staff support time.
Accrington and Rossendale College: “Across 4 Colleges £52,000 over 4 years”.
Xaverian College: “Before the advent of this cloud computing project, the College dedicated a significant
amount of technical support time to the daily management of its email system. The Mercury server
and its Pegasus end user client was the domain of a single member of the network support team with
specialist knowledge. As the College has grown year on year with ever constrained finances, the use
of a full time member of the team was becoming untenable. Moving to Office 365 has meant that
management of email is now distributed across the network team with the vast majority of technical
management handled by a third party. This has resulted in much needed support available in managing
the in house systems still present”.

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Case Study
Lessons Learned
Highbury College: “Close monitoring and communication of external providers is essential for the
success of the project”.
North East Worcestershire College: “We would have worked on understanding the training needs
required to fully grasp the tool sets and features available. Full roll out to everyone was ambitious
but as more people make use of the tools, more are moving towards the platform”.
Reaseheath College: “We would have carried it out as soon as the 2011-2012 academic year finished.”

7. 7

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With thanks to all project partners who contributed to the development
of this case study and consultant Chris West