Tassie govt preps e-mail consolidation project

Some 30,000 e-mail accounts will be centralised across government departments in Tasmania over the next three years with the big winner being Microsoft Exchange at the expense of Lotus Notes.

From this week the Department of Premier and Cabinet and its IT services organisation, TMD, will begin engaging with suppliers for the provision of migration and enhancement software for the central e-mail service.

TMD manages whole-of-government services in the state including the Networking Tasmania contract and the Oracle contract.

TMD has developed a Microsoft Exchange-based e-mail platform as whole-of-government service and is offering it to government agencies as a replacement for in-house e-mail services.

Subject to funding approval, TMD expects that most government agencies will move to the whole-of-government service over the next two to three years.

An identity management service has also been developed by TMD.

TMD is interested in procuring e-mail migration software and consulting services; an alternative solution to assist with migration of e-mail from many individual systems; and other software or services that may improve the new aggregated e-mail service, particularly customer reporting.

Reports will cover mailbox sizes and quotas, send and receipt statistics (internal and external), mailbox activity summary and mailbox security.

Most of Tasmania’s 30,000 government e-mail accounts are in “various versions” of Microsoft Exchange, but some are in Lotus Notes.

The Tasmanian government has been a Lotus Notes customer for some time and in 2003 six departments committed to a Lotus enterprise licence agreement increasing Notes clients from 3000 to 4000.

The products TMD chooses may be from one or more vendors, but the capability must include migration from Exchange 2003 and Lotus Notes to Exchange 2007 and support for the future migration of e-mail from Notes or Exchange 2003/2007 environments to Exchange 2010.

A proof-of-concept is slated for July 2010 with services to start the following month.

E-mail migrations will be done “as needed” during the project, which may be for a period of up to three years.