Microsoft Exchange Server 2007Customer Solution Case Study

State Government Saves $1 Million over Six Years by Standardizing Email Solution

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Government—State

Customer ProfileBased in the capital city of Lincoln, the Nebraska state government provides services for approximately 1.7 million people. Approximately 18,000 employees work at 93 state agencies.

Business SituationMany state agencies used their own email service, with the most prominent service being Lotus Notes. To save money and boost efficiency, the State of Nebraska aimed to replace these solutions with a consolidated email service.

SolutionThe State of Nebraska chose to standardize on a Microsoft communication and collaboration solution that provides integrated email, presence awareness, web conferencing, and online collaboration spaces

Benefits Reduced costs Improved efficiency Enhanced data security Improved standard of email service

“When looking to consolidate our email systems, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 had all the business requirements, was more prevalent in the marketplace, and was the most cost-effective.”

Brenda Decker, Chief Information Officer, State of Nebraska

The Office of the Chief Information Officer (OCIO) at the State of Nebraska provides IT services to 18,000 employees working in 93 agencies. When Governor Dave Heineman assumed office, he charged the OCIO with reducing the cost of doing business by deploying IT more effectively. The OCIO prioritized the aggregation and consolidation of email systems used by state agencies and replaced diverse, self-maintained agency email solutions with a Microsoft communication and collaboration solution. This shared services approach to IT deployment is expected to save the State of Nebraska more than U.S.$1 million over six years. Today, four full-time IT staff members at the OCIO administer a fully redundant, consolidated statewide email service that runs on four servers at the data center. Now staff in all agencies can work more productively across the state.

SituationThe state government of Nebraska administers services to approximately 1.7 million citizens through a network of 93 state agencies. When Nebraska Governor Dave Heineman assumed office in 2005, he made it a priority to increase the role of technology within his administration, using it to drive business efficiency at all levels of service. To that end, he enacted new legislation that reflected how he wanted to see the State of Nebraska utilize IT services.

“Shortly after his election, the governor created the Office of the Chief Information Officer [OCIO] to include both policy and operational aspects,” recalls Brenda Decker, Chief Information Officer at the State of Nebraska. “From that first decision, he signaled a new role for IT, establishing it as a high priority for this government. One of his first steps was to reduce the duplication of government services by consolidating our 11 different email services onto a single platform.”

Diverse Messaging SoftwareAlthough the majority of the state’s 93 agencies were responsible for their own email solutions, the OCIO did offer an IBM Lotus Notes email service to some 1,200 state employees. “It was a very mixed environment out there with a proliferation of redundant hardware,” confirms Stan Schmidt, IT Supervisor and Project Manager who supervised the email project at the State of Nebraska.

“Lotus Notes email was the primary solution used in many state agencies, but we also had incidences of Microsoft Exchange Server, Gmail, and local POP3 email providers. Different agencies also had

home-grown Lotus Notes collaborative applications. We did not have a statewide data recovery system in place. And at the OCIO, we spent many hours manually updating the global address list although we were never really confident of its accuracy.”

While some of the larger agencies such as the Department of Health and Human Services and the Department of Labor could offer more advanced messaging and collaboration services, smaller departments had to make do with less comprehensive communication capabilities. As there was no standard email alias for all government employees, at times it was difficult to determine if an individual worked for the state government. In a recent Government Technology article,* Governor Heineman says, “There is not a private-sector company in the world that does not do firstname.lastname@company.com. We wanted to get to that point. It is important to think as a team. We are not the Department of Revenue or the Department of Administrative Services; we are the State of Nebraska.”

Employee Dissatisfaction Decker and her peers in the OCIO kept hearing the same complaints from dissatisfied state employees who wanted more from their messaging solutions. “Staff did not share the same calendaring tools, so it was difficult to make appointments,” says Decker. “The governor could not even see the calendars of his cabinet members. We are a geographically dispersed organization, and staff members were desperate to use instant messaging and presence awareness to locate and quickly communicate with colleagues. We could

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“Staff did not share the same calendaring tools, so it was difficult to make appointments. The governor could not even see the calendars of his cabinet members.”Brenda Decker, Chief Information Officer,

State of Nebraska

not schedule resources, such as meeting rooms, projectors, or a car; all that had to be done manually. These little inefficiencies should not have been a way of life at the government, but they were.”

Nonstandardized Records RetentionHandling records requests is a daily occupation for many government employees, yet the State of Nebraska didn’t have a standard electronic record retention policy. Whether responding to a legal, personnel, or customer service issue, each agency had a different way of saving and searching its records. “Some of our small agencies were using services offered by a local commercial provider and the records were not even stored on state property,” recalls Decker. “At other agencies, we discovered that backups were put on disks and stored in employees’ houses. We needed to gain better control over records retention and backup processes.”

To eliminate email service duplication and deliver a better statewide messaging solution, Governor Heineman and Decker decided to expand to the entire organization the shared services business model that the OCIO had been using with a few agencies. Shared services bring similar processes and operations under one central organization to reduce redundancy, drive efficiency, and lower operating costs.

“There is no reason why government cannot be more like the private sector when it comes to business models,” says Decker. “The same goes for technology. The governor charged us with consolidating our email service for

employees. However, we are a total-cost-recovery environment, so every dollar I spend I have to earn from somewhere else. Whatever email solution we chose had to be functional and cost-effective.”

SolutionBecause of existing contractual agreements, the decision came down to a choice between Microsoft and IBM. “We conducted town-hall meetings where we asked our employees what they wanted out of their email system. Governor Heineman even called a meeting with the cabinet for the single purpose of discussing email,” says Decker. “We compiled a list of business needs and did a side-by-side comparison of costs over a six-year period. We were able to perform a true comparison because we would have had to buy new server hardware for either option. When looking to consolidate our email systems, Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 had all the business requirements, was more prevalent in the marketplace, and was the most cost-effective.” Also, the State of Nebraska chose to standardize on a Microsoft messaging solution because the OCIO saw Exchange Server 2007 as the foundation for a complete communication and collaboration platform that would answer the business needs of state employees. “We were hearing from the agencies that they wanted instant messaging, web conferencing, and online collaboration spaces,” says Decker. “So we decided to include licensing for Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007 and Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007, which employees can use to schedule online meetings and conference calls from inside Microsoft Office Outlook. We also

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added Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 to acquire a package of integrated collaboration technologies.”

Groundwork Laid for Deployment A global email migration can be a daunting prospect, but the IT staff at the OCIO worked closely with Microsoft to lay the groundwork for a deployment that minimized employee disruption. Microsoft helped to develop a programmatic governance model for migrating the agencies’ email and this repeatable process added efficiency to the deployment. The OCIO gave agencies three options for how their employees could migrate email. Employees could start out with a clean inbox, retaining only their calendar and contacts, they could migrate one day of email, or they could take two weeks’ worth of mail, which allowed them to retain their folder structures.

“We did not give them an option about naming conventions, however,” says Decker. “The governor was adamant that we all be easily recognizable as State of Nebraska employees. Also, we told the agencies they would be responsible for archiving their retired email environments.”

To prepare for the global migration to a Microsoft messaging solution, the State of Nebraska worked with its Microsoft consultants to consolidate and centralize its Active Directory Domain Services infrastructure. A central component of the Windows Server 2008 operating system, the Active Directory service provides functionality to centrally configure and administer system, user, and application settings.

All Agencies Migrated In September 2007, staff at the OCIO began meeting with each agency at least six weeks before their scheduled migration, inviting employees and business people to participate from the beginning. “We called these ‘T-minus’ meetings. They were scheduled once a week for each agency so we could gather information and prepare users for the migration,” explains Schmidt. “We used the Microsoft Transporter Suite tool to log on to the agencies’ email servers and convert their accounts to the Exchange Server environment.”

The actual mailbox migrations were scheduled to run during the night. The next morning, IT staff offered onsite support if needed. The OCIO migrated first and the governor’s office followed. “At first we had people working until the early hours of the morning, but we learned quickly and, by the end, we were down to 15 seconds per mailbox,” recalls Jayne Scofield, IT Administrator in Network Services at the State of Nebraska. “The more agencies we did, the more the word got around and people really jumped on board.”

As a result, the eight-member team from the OCIO completed the Exchange Server 2007 deployment in December 2009, six months ahead of schedule, migrating more than 16,000 mailboxes in just under 18 months. According to Scofield, Governor Heineman’s outspoken support of the project was a key contributor to its success. “It was also really important to have high-level support from the business side of each agency during those T-minus meetings,” she says. “The more people we had participating in discussions and planning up front, the smoother the rollout.

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“Centralizing our email system on a Microsoft solution across all our agencies and sharing hardware, software, IT staff, and best practices is going to save an estimated $1 million over six years.”Brenda Decker, Chief Information Officer,

State of Nebraska

Also, on the IT side, it is essential to create a team with individuals who have been removed from their everyday positions to work full time on the migration project.”

BenefitsSince standardizing on a Microsoft communication solution, the State of Nebraska has achieved the benefits of the shared service model. As one of the first major IT changes following Governor Heineman taking office, the migration offered tangible benefits and proved the value of a heightened role for IT within government. With a single, consolidated messaging and collaboration solution, the State of Nebraska is a more cost-efficient and effective government organization.

Reduced CostsAccording to Decker, the state’s email migration project proves that government can benefit from a more corporate approach to doing business. “Centralizing our email system on a Microsoft solution across all our agencies and sharing hardware, software, IT staff, and best practices is going to save an estimated $1 million over six years,” says Decker.

The State of Nebraska has seen financial benefits in several other areas. Under the decentralized solution, there were many aging e-mail servers in state agencies that needed replacement. Since standardizing on Exchange Server 2007, the state has been able to consolidate its purchases of software to ensure not only favorable pricing but also that Nebraska state agencies are fully compliant with legally licensed software.

“Instead of one person per agency administering their email service, today we have the equivalent of four full-time IT staff members managing the entire statewide messaging solution,” adds Schmidt. “That means we are saving dollars in IT labor costs required to keep our employees’ messaging system up and running seven days a week, 52 weeks a year.”

Improved Efficiency The OCIO was pleasantly surprised at how quickly employees adopted presence awareness and instant messaging to communicate in real time across agencies. The common email-naming convention also helps staff and citizens locate government employees. State agencies are also creating SharePoint sites for collaborating on agency business. “It is much easier for people to connect with each other, share calendars, and arrange meetings,” says Decker. “Even though we can now book meeting rooms and other resources online, agencies are also taking advantage of web conferencing by using Office Live Meeting 2007. Online meetings save time and travel expenses and are a boon for agencies in our rural areas.”

Since deploying a consolidated Microsoft messaging environment, IT employees perform standard backup, support, and disaster recovery functions daily for the entire state. These functions are a lot more efficient now that they are not based on diverse, agency-by-agency policies. All email messages are kept in one central location, so it is easier for staff to restore and retrieve messages as needed.

With one global address list and a centralized Active Directory infrastructure,

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IT staff no longer wastes time manually keeping track of every employee’s status. “It only takes minutes to migrate an employee between agencies, compared to hours before,” says Schmidt. “The IT staffs in the agencies are grateful that they can work on more strategic jobs rather than managing their own employees’ digital profiles.”

Enhanced Data SecurityThanks to significant hardware consolidation, the State of Nebraska has been able to introduce a data recovery solution for its messaging platform. Four servers running Exchange Server 2007 reside within the Office of the CIO and these are mirrored by four servers at another location. “Today, we have a complete back up of our emails, whereas before we had no single statewide email recovery program,” says Scofield.

The OCIO is only just beginning to implement statewide eDiscovery policies, but the ability to archive email is a high priority for the government. “It is much more efficient with only four people managing our email solution as opposed to all those people searching for items in multiple places in the agencies,” says Decker. “I remember the first request that came through for email records. Everyone was amazed at how quickly we were able to find the right emails to determine that the employee in question actually worked for a

specific agency at the specific time period needed.”

Improved Standard of Email ServiceBefore, with its disparate email environment, the OCIO could not guarantee that all state employees had the same level of service. It was difficult for IT staff members to ensure that productivity and employee satisfaction were not compromised for smaller agencies with reduced budgets. “Today, with our statewide Microsoft email solution, all state employees enjoy the same great level of email and collaboration service, no matter where they work,” concludes Decker.

*See www.govtech.com/e-government/Gov-Dave-Heineman-

Discusses-Nebraska-Electronic.html?page=2

Microsoft Server Product PortfolioFor more information about the Microsoft server product portfolio, go to:www.microsoft.com/servers

For more information about Microsoft Exchange Server, go to:www.microsoft.com/exchange

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For More InformationFor more information about Microsoft products and services, call the Microsoft Sales Information Center at (800) 426-9400. In Canada, call the Microsoft Canada Information Centre at (877) 568-2495. Customers in the United States and Canada who are deaf or hard-of-hearing can reach Microsoft text telephone (TTY/TDD) services at (800) 892-5234. Outside the 50 United States and Canada, please contact your local Microsoft subsidiary. To access information using the World Wide Web, go to:www.microsoft.com

For more information about State of Nebraska products and services, call (402) 471-2761 or visit the website at: www.nebraska.gov

This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.

Document published November 2010

Software and Services Microsoft Server Product Portfolio− Microsoft Exchange Server 2007

Microsoft Office− Microsoft Office Communications

Server 2007 R2

− Microsoft Office Live Meeting 2007− Microsoft Office SharePoint Server

2007 Technologies− Active Directory Domain Services

“Today, we have a complete back up of our emails, whereas before we had no single statewide email recovery program.”Jayne Scofield, IT Administrator, Network

Services, State of Nebraska.