Microsoft Online ServicesCustomer Solution Case Study

School District Saves $2 Million by Switching from Notes to Microsoft Cloud Email

OverviewCountry or Region: United StatesIndustry: Education—K–12

Customer ProfileFlorida Virtual School (FLVS) provides online courses for students seeking a nontraditional learning environment. During the 2009–2010 year, FLVS served 97,182 students in Florida, the United States, and internationally.

Business SituationFLVS employees wanted more modern communications tools that the school’s IBM Lotus Notes email system was not able to provide. That system was also expensive to maintain and scale.

SolutionFLVS switched to Microsoft Online Services to gain cloud–based email and a foundation for delivering online collaboration sites, web conferencing, instant messaging, and other services.

Benefits Savings of U.S.$2 million over five

years Cost-effective scalability Help-desk ticket reduction of 40

percent New communication possibilities

“Switching off Lotus Notes and moving to Exchange Online will save us $2 million over five years. That’s a great gift to Florida taxpayers.”

Roy Pennell, Chief Information Officer, Florida Virtual School

Florida Virtual School (FLVS) is a leader in providing virtual Kindergarten–12 solutions to students throughout Florida, the United States, and the world. FLVS depends on email messaging more than most schools to connect students and teachers because of its virtual environment. However, the school’s aging IBM Lotus Notes messaging system provided limited email access options, and the IT staff worried about rising costs. To solve these problems, FLVS switched to Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite to gain cloud–based email, collaboration, instant messaging, and web conferencing. FLVS will save U.S.$2 million over five years and be able to keep pace with rapid growth at reduced prices. The number of messaging–related support calls has dropped 40 percent, freeing the IT staff to focus on better supporting employees, who can now access email from smartphones and other devices.

SituationFlorida Virtual School (FLVS), based in Orlando, Florida, is an established leader in developing and providing virtual education solutions. Founded in 1997, FLVS was the first statewide, Internet–based public high school in the United States. Today, it serves students in grades Kindergarten–12 with a variety of online offerings that school districts can use to replace traditional classroom learning or complement classroom–based instruction. Part of the Florida public education system, FLVS served 97,182 students in all 67 Florida school districts, other U.S. states, and around the world during the 2009–2010 school year. These students completed a total of 213,962 half–credit courses. FLVS employs almost 1,000 full– and part–time instructors in addition to approximately 300 non–instructional staff. The 1,280-plus staff members are based throughout Florida, the United States, and the world.

Email CriticalFLVS staff depends heavily on email messaging to communicate and collaborate. Teachers rely on email to stay in touch with one another and with students, create and share lesson plans, and monitor online courseware. Staff members also rely on email to complete day–to–day responsibilities. Although FLVS does not provide students with email service, students rely on email to communicate with their teachers. If email stops, learning stops.

“The reliability and availability of our systems has to be almost perfect,” says Roy Pennell, Chief Information Officer for Florida Virtual School. The school district had long used IBM Lotus Notes to provide

email messaging to its teachers and staff members; Notes was also the foundation for a dozen business applications. However, Notes was unpredictable and expensive. FLVS had six servers in two locations running Notes, and mail frequently did not replicate properly between servers or did not arrive in a timely fashion. The calendaring function rarely worked consistently, leaving staffers unsure as to whether meetings were correctly scheduled. The IT staff considered fixing these problems, but did not have the resources to proceed.

Costs a ConcernNotes required specialized IT talent, which became increasingly hard to find and quite expensive. FLVS had to update servers and software every few years to stay current, and also had to routinely add new servers and software to keep up with the organization’s growth rate of 20 to 25 percent a year. “Our email costs were rarely congruent with the growth of organization, meaning, for example, that we had to buy a new server just to add 50 new employees,” Pennell says.

Because FLVS is a government organization, it has to abide by strict email retention policies. To keep storage costs down, the IT staff limited employee mailbox size to 250 megabytes (MB). But because employees had to keep messages for compliance purposes, they were constantly sorting through messages to decide which to save and which to delete, a task that took time away from students. Recovering email messages for compliance needs was difficult for the IT staff, requiring the retrieval of backup tapes from an off–site location. FLVS contracted this service to a

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“The reliability and availability of our systems has to be almost perfect.”

Roy Pennell, Chief Information Officer, Florida Virtual School

third party, which was expensive and often resulted in delays of days or weeks to fulfill e–discovery requests.

Poor Fit with Rest of EnvironmentFLVS needed a communications foundation that was less expensive and easier to manage, and on which it could build more advanced capabilities. It wanted to link email and voice mail using the Active Directory service from Microsoft to deliver unified communications, but Notes did not integrate with Active Directory. Employees had to maintain separate passwords for Notes and the predominately Microsoft software environment at FLVS.

The staff was unable to use smartphones to access email, so they could only access mail from their desktop or laptop computers. Additionally, most staff members had used the Microsoft Office Outlook messaging and collaboration client at previous employers or at home and they continually asked for that software.

SolutionShortly after Pennell joined FLVS in January 2009, he; Jean Gentile, Senior Manager of Software Development; and Mickey Hudson, Director of IT Services, analyzed the future of Notes at FLVS. “We knew that we either needed to upgrade our Notes environment or switch to something else,” Hudson says.

Put Email in the Cloud Because FLVS had a predominately Microsoft environment in its data center and on user desktops, the IT staff thought about replacing Notes with Microsoft Exchange Server. However, that option would have burdened the school with

hardware, software, and maintenance costs. So, FLVS took a close look at emerging cloud–based email solutions that ran in third–party data centers and were delivered over the Internet.

The small team evaluated Microsoft Exchange Online, Google Gmail, and the Yahoo! email solution. Exchange Online, part of the Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite, is a hosted, enterprise messaging solution based on Microsoft Exchange Server 2007 that provides web–based message access, 25 gigabytes (GB) of mailbox storage per licensed user, and financially backed service level agreements. In addition to Exchange Online, the Business Productivity Online Standard Suite includes Microsoft SharePoint Online for collaboration, Microsoft Office Communications Online for instant messaging and presence, and Microsoft Office Live Meeting for web conferencing.

“We performed an extensive analysis of all these solutions, looking at both functionality and pricing,” Pennell says. “After gathering the data, we decided to go with online email and specifically with the Business Productivity Online Standard Suite. We decided that we didn’t want to be in the business of maintaining mailboxes; we wanted to focus on the business of education.”

The most compelling vote for the Microsoft solution was the projected cost savings: U.S.$2 million over five years in hardware, software, and maintenance. Also, Exchange Online offered one critical feature that the Google and Yahoo! solutions did not: a smooth connection with Microsoft Office

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“We decided that we didn’t want to be in the business of maintaining mailboxes; we wanted to focus on the business of education.”

Roy Pennell, Chief Information Officer, Florida Virtual School

Outlook, which FLVS already owned as part of Microsoft Office. “Employees knew Office Outlook quite well and wanted it,” says Mark Schneider, Senior Project Manager at FLVS. “We also liked the single sign on feature and the compliance features that Microsoft provided.”

Schneider is referring to Microsoft Exchange Hosted Archive, which provides a centralized and easily accessible email and instant messaging repository to help FLVS manage retention, compliance, e–discovery, and regulatory requirements. Storage is unlimited and can be used for retention periods up to 10 years. Migrate and Train UsersFLVS began migrating its 1,280-plus employees to Exchange Online in February 2010. The staff migrated mailboxes in waves, finishing four months later. FLVS plans to increase its Business Productivity Online Standard Suite licenses to 1,900 in 2011, to keep pace with hiring.

The FLVS internal training department designed training to help employees make the move to Exchange Online. It created an “issues” website where employees could log problems and questions, and the IT staff could quickly resolve them. From this site, Pennell’s staff created a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page for subsequent user reference to reduce the number of help–desk tickets.

The IT staff removed Notes–based applications that were not being used and will gradually move the remainder to SharePoint sites.

Access Email from Any Device

Because employees no longer need to wait for messages to replicate between servers, email arrives more quickly. Staff can also access email from just about any place using practically any device. This convenience enables them to respond to student and business needs without being tied to their office PCs. Users have the full functionality of Outlook when they use the Microsoft web–based email client Outlook Web App.

BenefitsBy switching from Lotus Notes to Exchange Online, FLVS will realize significant savings over five years. It can also scale email more smoothly and cost effectively by buying licenses as needed. Email help–desk tickets are down, and FLVS has a foundation on which it can build many new communications capabilities to better meet staff needs.

Savings of $2 Million Over Five YearsFLVS has realized significant savings by moving to Microsoft Online Services. “Switching off Lotus Notes and moving to Exchange Online will save us $2 million over five years. That’s a great gift to Florida taxpayers,” Pennell says. That savings includes all the costs of an on–premises email environment: the servers and hosting fees, Notes software licensing, maintenance, Internet bandwidth to support access, storage, support staff, and the third–party compliance service.

Cost–Effective ScalabilityFLVS can also scale its email environment more easily and accurately predict messaging costs. “Our growth has been a phenomenal 20 to 25 percent a year since our founding,” Pennell says. “The ability to

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“The ability to provision additional users without any consideration for the underlying infrastructure or staffing is extremely refreshing and amazingly good for business.”

Roy Pennell, Chief Information Officer, Florida Virtual School

provision additional users without any consideration for the underlying infrastructure or staffing is extremely refreshing and amazingly good for business. If management tells me that we’ll have 3,000 employees in five years, I can estimate to the penny the cost of messaging services. Conversely, if we ever have a downturn, the flexibility works in the other direction.”

Help Desk Ticket Reduction of 40 PercentSince switching from Notes to Exchange Online, FLVS has seen a decrease in the number of messaging help–desk tickets despite a steady growth in number of employees. “We reduced our help–desk tickets by about 40 percent, from 250 tickets for Notes one month to 150 for Exchange Online,” Hudson says. “We’ve also reassigned two full–time employees from email support to user support. Because we were understaffed during the Notes days, we were unable to offer top service. Now, our staff has the time to provide better service to employees. Our user base has grown significantly in the past 12 months, and we haven’t had to grow our IT staff.” The FAQ website will help FLVS steadily reduce its number of email help–desk tickets.

The staff also appreciates the larger mailbox size, which minimizes the need to constantly purge email, and the simplified password maintenance. FLVS uses Microsoft Forefront Online Protection for Exchange, included with Exchange Online, for thorough virus–scanning and to help protect against spam and phishing scams.

New Communication Possibilities

FLVS teachers are no longer tethered to their portable or desktop computers to communicate with students and one another, as they were with Notes. They can access email from their phones, tablet computers, or other mobile devices, and from any browser. “Our teachers need to be able to communicate with students beyond 8:00 to 5:00 business hours, especially because students are all over the world,” Hudson says. “The portability of email across different platforms is an amazing benefit.” FLVS plans to deploy the entire Business Productivity Online Standard Suite in 2011 and upgrade to Microsoft Office 365 when it is released by Microsoft in late 2011. Office 365 is a comprehensive online productivity solution that will include email, voice mail, instant messaging, web portals, extranets, web conference, and Office desktop applications. It will combine those programs with Microsoft Lync Online to provide full–featured instant messaging, presence, and audio and video web conferencing through its federated Active Directory domain. “When all that comes to fruition, we will move into the next stage of sophistication in our communications environment,” Pennell says. “We will see a real change in the way people work and collaborate. By choosing Microsoft Online Services, we have a platform that we can grow with and build on into the foreseeable future.”

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“Our teachers need to be able to communicate with students beyond 8:00 to 5:00 business hours, especially because students are all over the world. The portability of email across differs platforms is an amazing benefit.”

Mickey Hudson, Director of IT Services, Florida Virtual School

Microsoft Online ServicesMicrosoft Online Services are business-class communication and collaboration solutions delivered as a subscription service and hosted by Microsoft. With these offerings, customers can cost-effectively access the most up-to-date technologies and immediately benefit from streamlined communications, simplified management, and business-class reliability and security features. For IT staffers, Microsoft Online Services are backed by strong service level agreements and help reduce the burden of performing routine IT management, freeing up time to focus on core business initiatives.

For more information, visit: www.microsoft.com/online

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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 Florida Virtual School products and services, call (407) 513-3587 or visit the website at: http://flvs.net

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

Document published February 2011

Software and Services Microsoft Online Services− Microsoft Business Productivity

Online Standard Suite− Microsoft Exchange Online

− Microsoft Forefront Online Protection for Exchange

Solution− Software-plus-services