Project Background

Purpose

This project came about as a result of campus leadership looking for ways to save at least $1 million in campus IT spending over 2009-2011 fiscal years. The purpose of this project is to reduce campus IT expenditures while continuing to assure that faculty and staff have dependable e-mail services for academic and administrative functions.

Overview

North Carolina State University's Office of Information Technology (OIT) offers faculty, staff, and students centralized e-mail services. OIT currently supports two e-mail systems, the WolfWise integrated e-mail and calendaring system and the Unity (Cyrus) e-mail system. An estimated 10 colleges and departments also provide their own e-mail service. In November 2008, OIT launched a Student E-mail Initiative to investigate outsourcing student e-mail. The Single-Source E-mail project addresses staff and faculty e-mail services. The initial Single-Source Campus E-mail task force report estimated the annual savings of implementing a single e-mail provider campus-wide would range between $55,000 - $157,000; subsequent estimates based on moving all faculty and staff to the WolfWise messaging system have projected savings to be $295,000 - $420,000 per year.

Goals & Objectives

This project proposes to migrate all faculty/staff to the WolfWise messaging system and furthermore to

• Verify number of mail servers currently supported outside of OIT
• Require all users of such systems be migrated into WolfWise
• Identify plan to recoup salary dollars associated with current support of unity and college-maintained servers

Authority

NC State University CIO, Dr. Marc Hoit chartered this project. Endorsement will be sought from from Deans and Provost; the implementation will be reviewed with Academic IT Directors.

Major Constraints and Assumptions

In order to identify potential real dollar savings from a single-source e-mail service for staff and faculty, the initial task force made a series of assumptions:

• Any centralization would be to OIT's WolfWise system.
• All remaining users on the Unity Email system (Cyrus) would be migrated to WolfWise.
• All students will be outsourced to a "student email service".
• Any software licenses or maintenance would be terminated and forthcoming costs realized as savings.
• One of the central anti-spam and virus solutions would be discontinued.
• Termination of OIT-hosted webmail (Squirrelmail) service in lieu of WolfWise web interface.
• Any savings realized by these assumptions must then be offset by the cost of scaling up the WolfWise environment to host all faculty and staff.