University Reduces Total Cost of Ownership for Email Service by 40 Percent

Organizations of all sizes, all around the world are making the move to cloud computing in order to take advantage of the immense benefits that it has to offer. Today we learn why Microsoft was the best decision for European University Cyprus in their move to embrace cloud computing!

“Microsoft Online Services helped us reduce our total cost of ownership for email by 40 percent, thanks to savings in hardware costs and software licensing.” -- Costas Papaconstantinou, Director of MIS

European University Cyprus
Based in Nicosia, the capital city of Cyprus, European University Cyprus (EUC) offers undergraduate and postgraduate degrees in a range of programs in arts, business, education, law, and health sciences. EUC is a member of Laureate International Universities, the largest network of higher education institutions in the world, with more than 600,000 students.

IT Challenges
In 2009, in the face of fiscal restraint, the five-person IT department took a more active role in supporting the university’s vision of superior services. It replaced its rudimentary, on-premises email service for students and alumni with Microsoft Live@edu, a no-cost suite of hosted email and collaboration services. Learn more from this video:

Live@edu solved the problems with student email, but a year later we were experiencing similar problems with our on-premises email system for faculty and staff,” says Costas Papaconstantinou, Director of Management Information Systems at European University Cyprus. “It took almost one full-time equivalent to maintain our aging email servers, and I was getting calls in the middle of the night to solve service interruptions. Faculty wanted to access email remotely and share calendars, and there were problems with limited inbox capacity. Sometimes student assignments were rejected because the professor’s inbox was full. We wanted to get out of supporting email altogether, so we could focus on more strategic IT projects for the university.”

Solution and Benefits
In September 2010, the IT department evaluated several cloud service providers, including Google Apps for Education and Microsoft Office 365. “We wanted an email solution for faculty that would interoperate with Live@edu and our Learning Management System, Moodle,” says Papaconstantinou. “The Microsoft offering was the best.”

To begin, EUC is taking advantage of a low-cost, per-user, per-month subscription to Exchange Online, which includes access to the Microsoft Outlook messaging client, browser-based access to email using Microsoft Outlook Web Access, and access to email from mobile devices using Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync technology.

With the help of Microsoft Services, the European University Cyprus employed best practices for the most efficient, cost-effective migration possible. They were able to migrate all the mailboxes in one weekend. “The migration from the old on-premises system was so smooth,” says Papaconstantinou. “We moved 400 mailboxes within one weekend. The changes to our users’ computing environment were minimal. Staff got to work on Monday morning as usual, except with an inbox capacity that is 10 times larger. Everyone was happy.”

With Microsoft Online Services that provide cloud-based communication and collaboration offerings, EUC established itself as a technically savvy institution that cares about finding the best tools for students and staff. “By moving to cloud technology, we can focus more on our students and on providing support to our faculty for their teaching and research,” says Hassabis.

EUC also reduced costs. Choosing a Microsoft cloud-based email service means the university can do more with a limited IT budget. It is no longer funding a full-time-equivalent position to support email.

“Microsoft Online Services helped us reduce our total cost of ownership for email by 40 percent, thanks to savings in hardware costs and software licensing,” says Papaconstantinou. “With the money that we are saving, we can take advantage of more Microsoft cloud services. We are looking at additional services within Office 365, such as Lync Online, and other Microsoft cloud-based products, such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online.”

Read the full case study