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I understand the church has just moved from Groupwise to Exchange, I am curious as to the drivers behind this. I thought we were Novell house?

portseven wrote:I understand the church has just moved from Groupwise to Exchange, I am curious as to the drivers behind this. I thought we were Novell house?

This is correct. The change-over occurred last Friday. I don't know the reasons why.

Tom

tomw wrote:This is correct. The change-over occurred last Friday. I don't know the reasons why.

Tom

Fairenough, I was actually one of the first support calls to the helpdesk on the new Exchange system, I was helping a new Mission President get connected to his LDS e-mail. I think we caught them off guard!

Yeah I was just wondering why the move from Groupwise, as from what I hear its a more scalable product, if less popular and so easy to integrate with other stuff.

Just discovered the CIO is ex Microsoft, that may explain the migration...

portseven wrote:Just discovered the CIO is ex Microsoft, that may explain the migration...

It also may be a better product or better meet the Church's needs...? Perhaps the Church gets a better discount or something with Joel's connections?

mkmurray wrote:It also may be a better product or better meet the Church's needs...? Perhaps the Church gets a better discount or something with Joel's connections?

ZD Net Australia reported that the pricing of GroupWise 8 was about $143 per seat. (http://www.zdnet.com.au/news/software/s ... 348,00.htm) Exchange 2007 has Enterprise seat licenses for $35 per seat. That being the case, Microsoft may just have under bid Novell for the business.

mkmurray wrote:Perhaps the Church gets a better discount or something with Joel's connections?

I think that the Church gets a pretty good discount anyway, just from the sheer size of the organization.

And I know of one incident, many years ago, where the Church asked them to take care of a particular matter very expeditiously, and they did it that day.

So, I think the Church has some level of major clout in this instance. As always in any relationship, things may have changed, of course.

Last year, Cassie wrote a pretty good piece on the transition from Novell to Exchange here...

http://tech.lds.org/index.php?option=co ... icle&id=46

One of the reasons cited was consolidating 125 servers distributed throughout the world to just 4 located in the Provo data center.