Macquarie University migrates emails to Google Workspace

Macquarie University is home to approximately 35,000 students and 5,500 members of staff. Located within the high-technology corridor of Sydney’s north-west, Macquarie University graduates are highly sought-after. Macquarie University is one of Australia’s leading research universities, it is a dynamic, flexible and engaged university committed to excellence in research, teaching and global citizenship. Formed in 1964, the University prides itself on being enquiring, open to new ideas, new ways of thinking and new ways of ensuring a sustainable institution.

Macquarie University had been providing a number of email systems for staff with the main system being a Novell GroupWise system. The GroupWise setup catered for approximately 80% of staff, with the remaining 20% on a variety of other systems, and provided email service to staff since 2005. With approximately 5,500 users, the Novell GroupWise system spanned over 29 GroupWise Post Offices.

In 2007 Macquarie University migrated the entire student body over to Google Workplace for Education using CloudM. With staff and their lectures on GroupWise and students using Google Workplace, managing multiple systems became a very costly undertaking.

“The main issue for Macquarie University was to remove the costs and complexity of managing multiple email systems and to consolidate on one system”

– Norbert Attard, Technology Project Leader at Macquarie University

With a large student user base already happy on Google Workplace, the choice was obvious. Macquarie University decided to migrate away from Novell GroupWise to Google Workplace for its staff users.

Marc Bailey CIO at Macquarie University says:

“Success at cloud-sourcing email depends entirely on two factors beyond feature/benefits, namely out-of-box experience and consumer confidence. CloudM delivered Macquarie University the best possible impression of our new system from the very first customer click. Combined with a great project team, some intense planning, training and communication, we were able to engender the confidence needed to rapidly reach an adoption tipping point, then smoothly proceed to completion”

CloudM was the clear choice for this project. The tool allows entire organizations of any size to migrate to Google Workplace efficiently and with no downtime. As CloudM had already proven its ability to migrate to Google Workplace and supported email, calendar and contacts, it was a perfect match for the University's requirements.

The migration was smooth and efficient. Simultaneously running the migration tool on 8 Dual Core 4GB workstations, Macquarie University seamlessly migrated all 5,500 users from Novell GroupWise to Google Workplace for Education over the course of a few weeks and with no data loss.

“CloudM was invaluable in helping us migrate our staff to Google Workplace. The product was excellent and meant we reduced our migration time by about 30%. Where any problems did arise, the technical support response was first class”

Providing over 7GB of email storage per student, Google Workplace for Education delivers all the email and collaboration needs of Macquarie University.