Northwestern Collaboration Services Initiative

Northwestern has for many years relied on an open-source email system with limited features and an "un-integrated" calendaring system used by only a small portion of the faculty and staff. The Information Technology Strategic Plan for 2011-2013 outlined plans to deploy an enterprise-level collaboration system to support the mission of a modern university.

After an extensive evaluation, Microsoft's market-leading family of messaging and collaboration products has been selected for university-wide deployment. The resulting system will be an integrated platform of cutting edge tools that will provide a foundation for new collaborative practices, enhanced productivity, and regulatory compliance that includes e-mail, calendar, mobile access, instant messaging, Web conferencing, and document sharing components. The new system will serve the collaboration needs of all schools and departments across the University.

Implement an IT Action Plan (Business Requirements) to deploy integrated enterprise collaboration services to carry out the business of Northwestern University.

Specifically:

• Provide University-wide, comprehensive collaboration solution that includes integrated email, calendar, mobile access, instant messaging, web conferencing, and document sharing components
• Increase user/team productivity facilitated by the use of a common set of tools for communication and collaboration
• Integrate document sharing and collaboration with day-to-day tools
• Provide common instant messaging solution
• Provide seamless and feature-rich Smartphone access to collaboration solution
• Provide fully functional web access to collaboration features
• Eliminate departmental costs for faculty and staff for:
• calendaring
• web conferencing
• Microsoft Office
• Windows 7
• Reduce departmental costs for all future purchases of Microsoft products and support not covered in the agreement

• Collaboration Services Steering Committee
• Collaboration Services Active Directory Working Group
• Collaboration Services Deployment Working Group
• Collaboration Services Communications and Training Working Group
• Collaboration Services Faculty Working Group

The deployment of enterprise collaboration services will lead to:

• Telephone, voicemail, and fax integration within the NU Collaboration Services solution
• Improved collaboration with affiliates and other universities
• More useful and data-rich University directory within the NU Collaboration Services solution
• Ability to distribute software centrally when needed
• Elimination of or substantially reduced spam software costs
• Reduced cost for upgrading the University's voice mail system
• Incorporation of existing Microsoft collaboration installations (Kellogg, Feinberg, etc.) as appropriate
• Integration with other University systems
• Flexibility to shift to a hosted solution in the future should that solution mature to meet the University's requirements

A phased deployment is planned over the span of 18 - 24 months.

• Phase 1A – Active Directory Project (Identity Management System) *
• Phase 1B – Calendar and Email (Exchange 2010) (iPhone, Android, etc. Access) *
• Phase 1C – Blackberry Enterprise Server Project (Blackberry Access) *
• Phase 1D – SPAM / Virus (Sophos, Forefront, Symantec) *
• Phase 1E – Microsoft Office 2010 Project (Outlook) *
• Phase 2 – Instant Messaging and Web Conferencing (Office Communication Server)
• Phase 2.5 – Voicemail (Outlook Integration)
• Phase 3 – Document Store / Share / Retrieve (SharePoint 2010)