Taking Gryph Mail to the Cloud

University scheduled to set up 60,000 mailboxes on a public cloud.

In 2007, the University of Guelph transitioned from separate platform email and calendaring systems to an integrated, collaborative suite of tools furnished by VMware Zimbra and which the community has branded Gryph Mail. This was the first step in a deliberate decision to provide a communication and calendaring system that is shared by all students, faculty and staff: a true community communication network.

VMware Zimbra is a leader in open source, next-generation email and collaboration software with over 66 Million paid mailboxes worldwide. Over the last 3 years we have succeeded in stabilizing our environment to industry standard uptimes (over 99% in 2010), we developed a community Service Level Agreement, expanded quotas, significantly reduced spam (blocking close to a million messages a day), and introduced integration with new mobile devices like the iPhone and the Android. We have worked with the campus community to make more effective use of the calendar functions. We will soon launch a sidebar zimlet which seamlessly consolidates your shared calendars and highlights important dates; we are confident this will help reduce clutter from mass emails. We also introduced the CCS Innovation Fund which will result in a number of exciting new enhancements built by students, for students.

Continuing with our philosophy to efficiently use our resources by leveraging existing tools, we are now taking Gryph Mail to the next level and have entered into a new hosting solution for our Gryph Mail environment. We will be moving forward with our plans to migrate the University's collaborative suite to a cloud-based service hosted by Scalar Decisions, a long-time and trusted partner, at their facilities in the GTA. Aside from email quotas increasing to 8GB, the transition will be virtually seamless. We anticipate some very brief individual service outages as accounts are moved over to the new hosted solution. Details on the transition will be posted to the CCS website over the next few months: www.uoguelph.ca/ccs

According to Bo Wandschneider, Deputy CIO, “We are moving to a hosted model to enhance service, further capitalize on cost savings and efficiencies and to benefit from the increased availability and security that cloud deployment offers. The move to Scalar Managed Zimbra is a natural step in our evolution. It not only puts us on a par with leading universities around the world, it strengthens our commitment to improve the student and faculty experience while at the same time introducing significant cost savings and service efficiencies.”

Mike Ridley, CIO says, “This will provide us with an opportunity to continue to grow and expand our collaborative services and maintain the security of knowing that our data is highly secure, fully encrypted and offering the level of confidentiality our community demands.”

More details will be released as they become available. The Scalar Decisions release can be found here.

For more information contact:

Bo Wandschneider
Deputy CIO and
Associate Director, Strategic Planning and Partnerships
Computing and Communications Services
University of Guelph
519-824-4120 ext 56410