Public sector
Case Study:
University of Melbourne embraces mobility
7 May 2008
Australia’s University of Melbourne is among the world’s best universities. Its main campus is in Parkville, a suburb just north of Melbourne city centre, and it has seven other campuses across Melbourne and rural Victoria. The university has around 45,000 students and nearly 6,000 full-time and part-time staff.
Top administrative personnel at the university — including the vice chancellor, senior vice principals, and deans of the various faculties — often have to move between campus sites and buildings in order to carry out their work. This can mean being away from their desks for long periods. Occasionally, these officials are also required to travel around the country or overseas. During such periods, it is vital that they can remain in touch with their e-mail, diaries, and other information critical to their work.
A number of these university executives used converged devices, largely for accessing e-mail. Since each department in the university tended to operate an autonomous IT support, there was little coherence across the institution for providing mobile e-mail access. This had led to the deployment of an assortment of sometimes incompatible technologies. The most common remote e-mail solution used was the BlackBerry, supplied by Research in Motion.
“Various departments had installed BlackBerry Enterprise Server on an ad hoc basis,” says Gregory Morgan, the university's manager of IT services. “But since they were also using other types of devices, it was extremely difficult to organise anything centrally or create efficiencies. We knew we’d be able to provide better IT support if we brought everyone in the university under the same roof and had them using the same mobile messaging software.”
Another big driver for change was university officials’ desire for a smarter calendar capability. “Many of these executives wanted to carry their diaries around with them, but still have them maintained and updated by their personal assistants back in the office,” says Morgan.
At the time, the university was implementing Microsoft Exchange Server 2003. “We saw that this was an opportunity to establish a secure, high-redundancy back-end infrastructure that was centrally managed and whose quality could more easily be guaranteed,” says Morgan. “The challenge was to choose the best enterprise mobility solution to meet our specific needs.”
The university’s IT department decided that the choice was between Direct Push using Windows Mobile and Microsoft Exchange, and an alternative built around BlackBerry devices. “We did a comprehensive evaluation of both environments based on our own experiences of people using the BlackBerry and other devices, and secondly on information put forward in white papers by both vendors,” says Morgan. “Both technologies were very good, but in the end we had to pick the one that gave us the most advantages — and that was undoubtedly Windows Mobile 5.0. A key reason was the greater familiarity of staff with a Windows environment.”
Once Microsoft Exchange Server 2003 had been deployed there was no need to install any additional infrastructure to get the remote capability, Direct Push using Exchange ActiveSync, up and running. “All we needed to do was purchase the relevant devices because syncing with Exchange through ActiveSync is a built-in feature of Windows Mobile 5.0 devices,” says Morgan.
While BlackBerry requires additional software to be installed, Exchange ActiveSync establishes and maintains an encrypted connection between the device and the server to push new email messages, schedules, contact information, and tasks to the device. Synchronization is extremely fast, with enhanced data compression that enables rapid sending and receiving of messages.
The university supports devices such as I-Mate’s Jasjam and Smartflip handsets. “Staff can use any device that runs Windows Mobile 5.0, including from vendors such as HP, Acer, and Palm,” says Morgan. “But we don’t support these devices centrally — which means we don’t manage things like global roaming, adjustments to users’ data limits, routine technical assistance, and training.”
The deployment of the Microsoft mobile messaging solution has brought a range of benefits to Melbourne University’s administrative staff and the organisation as a whole. It has enabled executives to stay on top of work while away from their desks and to manage their workloads more smartly and efficiently. It has also minimized hardware and data usage costs and generated significant economies of scale. Key staff can now access their e-mail, calendar, contacts, and tasks with ease.
“Melbourne University has a very large campus, and getting from one location to another can sometimes take up to half an hour. You can’t typically drive from building to building,” says Morgan. “Being able to get an update of something important while on the move stops valuable time being wasted.”
Administrative staff can also conduct business more cleverly. “It is now possible for personal assistants to accept meetings on their behalf in their calendars and afterwards send through by e-mail any documents or notes they might need for them to read prior to the meeting.”
Executives are also happy with the familiarity of Windows Mobile. “They find they can open up e-mail attachments that are delivered in Microsoft Office Word or Microsoft Office Excel formats,” Morgan says. “Also, they’re able to operate other vital features, such as previewing tasks and looking up contacts, in exactly the same way as they would on their desktops.”
The university does not have to pay any additional software costs or deploy a separate server for Exchange with ActiveSync and Windows Mobile 5.0, as it does for the Blackberry Enterprise Server.
Another benefit of the Microsoft mobile messaging platform from an IT perspective is its scalability. “Now that we have the understanding of how to make mobile email available on a small scale, it’s easy to expand it to as many users as we need,” Morgan points out. “It’s the same effort to make the service available to two people as to the more than 200 people we currently have using it. You also get tremendous economies of scale because the support costs of rolling out these devices are very low. You’ve obviously got the costs of ownership of the devices, but if they’re all centrally monitored and maintained it’s very easy to update and manage the whole service. From an enterprise point of view we believe it’s been a very worthwhile investment.”