Microsoft Office 365Customer Solution Case Study

Office 365 delivers ‘lifelong email' service for students and teachers

OverviewCountry or Region: KoreaIndustry: EducationCustomer ProfileDankook University was established as a private university in 1947. With an additional campus ein Cheonan established in 1978 and the further transfer to the Jukjeon Campus in 2007, Dankook University is a model of how to rethink education in order to respond to the times.Business SituationIn the course of preparation for groupware setup, the university first planned to change the now ageing email server, built back in 2006.SolutionTo meet security compliance requirements, university staff would have their email provisioned by a server on campus, whilst the large student body would have its email delivered through Office 365, given that the latter is capable of supporting a large number of users.Benefits Significant reduction in cost No effort required for email account

management Email account as a means of

communication and collaboration

“In the past, the university had invested one hundred million won to

run its old email server. Considering that the number of student

accounts is much larger than that of staff, Office 365 practically

reduced the cost of providing email service for students to zero.”Do-Yeon Kim, Dankook University Division of Information & Communications

Dankook University has offered the new email service to staff and students starting from the first semester of this year. The university had previously run a large email server that supported about 40,000 users and which was setup back in 2006. It decided to replace this server as part of the groupware setup project, which ran in 2012 in order to answer the business need of addressing how to provision the increasing numbers of university email users. As an example as to why this number has continued to spiral, in order to access discount promotions for students and take part in company-sponsored student contests, you typically need to have a university domain email account as means of identification. What’s more, the university email account is also the first port of call for accessing often important information. Dankook University, in surveying current needs and extrapolating out to form likely forecasts of future need, realized that its existing infrastructure, including email server and storage, was ill-equipped to support tens of thousands of users. To address this issue head on, Dankook University chose to implement a strategy of ‘choice and concentration’. In other words, the university decided to adopt Office 365 Exchange Online, which was an affordable way to service a large number of students. Alongside this, it chose to implement Exchange Server for the staff email service, given that the latter requires tan especially stringent-level of security. The only difference between two environments is the location of the server. Both Office 365 Exchange Online and Exchange Server allow for integrated management of email accounts via Active Directory infrastructure. With this hybrid model, Dankook University can not only respond to student calls for the latest features without needing, in doing that, to shell out extra for server extensions, upgrades and storages, but it also means the university is able to offer a lifelong email service to its graduates.

SituationDankook University has been providing the

new email service for staff and students from the first semester of this year. The university previously had an email server capable of supporting about 40,000 users with a solution which was developed by a domestic company in 2006. Then in 2012, the university decided to adopt Microsoft Exchange Server-based groupware in order to improve the work efficiency of university staff. With the decision made to push forward with

the groupware project, Dankook University was faced with a difficult choice: whether to bring in new equipment and a new solution to the existing computer center located on campus and thereby integrate the email service to both staff and students; or, whether to instead adopt a hybrid-model whereby a separate server would be implemented for the staff email service, given that it requires a higher level of security compliance, with a separate public cloud used for the student email service. In the end, the decision to go with the hybrid

model was an easy choice for Dankook University to make. In terms of security, operation and cost, the combined use of Microsoft Exchange Server with Office 365 seemed to be the most reasonable investment in the long-term. In fact, the hybrid model-based email service was an ideal way to solve many of the problems extant in the old environment. Dankook University was all too aware of the

root cause of the inconveniences users faced with the existing email service environment. There were frequent complaints from users about how the existing university email account supported only POP3, meaning that to use email on devices such as smartphones or tablets, they had to go through a complicated configuration procedure, rather

than simply being able to install an app and go. Another frequent gripe was that many pages did not display properly on mobile devices as there was no Active X support available. The problems users ran up against with the now old system caused extra stress for the university administrators in terms of then having to regularly clear up the many accounts made dormant through users which switched off through frustration and inconvenience. As well as lack of mobile device support, the

existing email service lacked support for multiple languages. With education being the global industry it is today, professors frequently need to communicate and cooperate with countries across the globe, whether for education or research. As of 2011, for example, Dankook University had a sisterhood relationship with 190 universities throughout the world. Though the existing email server was good in terms of features and UI from the perspective of domestic users, in terms of global support, it lacked the multilingual functionality. Those who communicated with overseas on a regular basis frequently complained of text in emails becoming rendered unreadable in garbled Cyrillic. Though such problems were not critical in

themselves, when examined against a backdrop of a continuing rise in demand for email accounts, there was a clear business need to solve them. Dankook University used to offer university email accounts only to those who explicitly wanted them, given that many accounts were simply left unused. What the university saw, though, was an increasing number of students actively using the email account. Dankook University pointed out that the reasons behind this popularization of emails were the various promotions it entitled users to access, and the community support

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provided by companies through email authentication. As to the latter reason, this followed on the back of the Personal Information Protection Act, which meant companies were forced to prove people’s identity, given that they had to prevent the leakage of personal information such as name, address and phone number. In this respect, it became common among

companies to ask for a university email address when promoting marketing campaigns targeting university students. For example, companies typically ask for an email address with the school domain when providing a community service for students on Facebook or other forms of social media. Plus, Microsoft asks students to prove their identity with their school email address as a way to access student discount promotions for Windows, Office and DreamSpark, a service offering the development tools and software students need at no cost. Given the direction in which the university web ecosystem is evolving, delivering a better user experience for university email is must. Dankook University was able to achieve this with Office 365.

SolutionIn late 2012, Dankook University pushed

forward Office 365 project in cooperation with Microsoft Korea's partner, LimeOrange.Com. This project was carried out under a two-phase plan: account creation and the transfer of the existing mailbox. In this respect, LimeOrange.Com established a framework for the hybrid email service operating model in such a way that the account information of staff and students are managed through the same Active Directory with the help of groupware provider. Meanwhile, the information of students and retired school

personnel is linked to a public cloud service: Office 365 Exchange Online. This framework is designed to provide a

‘lifelong account’ to students and staff. In other words, staff get registered with Exchange Server and, when they retire, their accounts are not phased out, but rather reassigned to Office 365. Such they ever be reinstated as active staff members in the future, they do not need to be allotted with a new account, but their identification in the Active Directory is simply changed and assigned with a mailbox in the on-campus server. For example, when a student rejoins the school as a member of faculty after graduation, their account information remains the same, but only their identification is changed on the Active Directory. In effect, the link for the email account is changed from Office 365 to the on-campus Exchange Server. Likewise, identification and the mailbox can

be easily transferred between the on-campus server and the cloud. "With the use of the same Exchange API on both servers, data can be easily exchanged. Plus, there are various means of transfer which can be used for this, including Outlook PST file and IMPA connection”, said an official from LimeOrange.Com. Dankook University and LimeOrange.Com

cleared from the list of 40,000 accounts any dormant accounts which had been left unused for a long time. They subsequently chose mailboxes of about 20,000 users who actually use their account for migration. In doing so, mailboxes of staff were migrated to Exchange Server and those of students to Office 365 Exchange Online. Upon successful completion of this project, Dankook University was able to provide its new email service from the beginning of the first semester in 2013, which started in May.

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Benefits

Significant reduction in costThe greatest benefit Dankook University

acquired from using the public cloud for students’ email service is a significant cost reduction. In the past, the university had invested one hundred million won to run its old email server. Considering that the number of student accounts is much larger than that of staff, Office 365 practically reduced the cost of providing email service for students to zero. The use of Office 365 has led to a reduction

in long-term cost equal to that of initial cost, in terms of storage. The size of student's mailbox provided in May 2013 is 25GB. From the viewpoint of students using tens of GB on web, a mailbox with a GB in single figures is simply not enough to exchange the data they want. In that respect, the university needed to provide a mailbox of at least 10GB to each student. However, this is prohibitive when calculated in terms of a direct investment. Moreover, the storage costs a fortune to provide an email service for hundreds of thousands of both enrolled students and graduates. Interestingly, though, despite the significant

cost reductions, this is not the area on which Dankook University attributes the greatest value in Office 365. That is, the use of Office 365 has opened up a new range of possibilities for providing a lifelong email account service to hundreds of thousands of users. Though it became easy to store the list of contacts in several forms of devices or services and social media has made it possible to find friends, bonds made at university can quickly weaken once people lose touch with each other. In this regard, Dankook University expects this email account to remain as a digital-based form of personal identification way into the future, akin to a student ID, enabling students and graduates to liaise together and thus bring the Dankook University community together.

No effort required for management

With the combined use of Exchange Server and Office 365 Exchange Server, Dankook University IT managers were able to focus on the management of the staff email service, which requires a high-level of security and quality. In other words, they were able to leave the management of the service for students that accounted for nearly 90% of email accounts to Microsoft. In terms of the latter point, there is nothing for IT managers to do except setup the system when issuing a digital ID and maybe an email account, on a case-by-case basis, once the ID number for the staff member or student is issued. In addition, IT managers now don’t need to

concern with the upgrade of email server. When Dankook University adopted Office 365, Exchange Online was based on Exchange Server 2010, but as of February 28, 2013, an Exchange Server 2013-based service was launched. Consequently, the university's email service for students will be provided based on the latest server version. This is a great time-saver for IT managers, who have nothing much to do with this, given that they can concern themselves primarily with the area of the greatest need, upgrading the staff email service, with Microsoft managers being responsible for updates to the student email service. Dankook University expects that the upgrade to Exchange Server 2013 will make it much easier for students to use the Office 365-based email service. In particular, those students using the latest PC or laptop with Windows 8 installed will be able to make better use of the university email account through the new and improved Outlook app.

Email account as a means of communication and collaborationDankook University is now using only Office

365 Exchange Online. It plans to the leverage the benefits already accrued to further exploit collaboration features such as SharePoint Online provided through Office 365. After adopting Exchange Online, an increasing number of students began to use not only email, but also schedule management on their smart phone or tablet. In this regard, Dankook

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University will observe their use of Exchange Online and draw up an integrated communication and collaboration model best suited for the university using Office 365.

Microsoft Office 365Microsoft Office 365 brings together cloud versions of our most trusted communications and collaboration products—Microsoft SharePoint Online, Exchange Online, and Lync Online—with the latest version of our Office desktop suite and companion web applications for businesses of all sizes. For more information about Microsoft Office 365, go to: www.office365.com

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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 products and services, call or visit the website at:

For more information about products and services, call or visit the website at:

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

Document published August 2012

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 Dankook University, visit the website at: www.dankook.ac.kr

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

Document published May 2013

Software and Services Microsoft Office 365 Plan E3