Exchange Calendaring Proposal
— Approved by Tech Council 01/22/2007 —
Problem
There are currently two shared calendar solutions in use at Illinois State University: Meeting
Maker, with 1,500 accounts, and Outlook, connected to Exchange servers, with 1,000 accounts.
There may be as many as 600 Exchange users who use Outlook exclusively, and there may be as
many as 400 Exchange users who use both meeting Maker and Outlook solutions and try to keep
them in sync manually. There are nearly 1,100 people who do not have an Exchange account and
who use Meeting Maker exclusively. A single campus wide shared calendar solution would
benefit all users.
Proposed Temporary Solution
A centralized and consolidated Exchange model is the best solution to this problem; at this time,
however, that has been determined to be cost prohibitive. As a short-term, temporary solution, it
is recommended that additional capacity on the existing (non-fault tolerant) Exchange
infrastructure is a short-term solution be created to allow usage of Outlook/Exchange as the
shared calendar for faculty/staff. The scope of this solution is limited to providing an Exchange
shared calendar solution for the estimated 1,100 current Meeting Maker users who are not using
Exchange, and accounts for approximately 300 resources (e.g., conference rooms) that may be
included in calendar invitations. Providing services to any additional clients who are not
currently using the Meeting Maker shared calendar may require the purchase of additional
storage devices.
Expansion of the Existing Exchange Infrastructure
The existing Exchange infrastructure could be expanded by adding one more “back-end” server
to the existing eight at an initial cost of about $15,700 (for hardware and software). This server
would be configured very much like the other eight and would assume a similar role as the other
eight in the “single forest, multiple tree” Exchange architecture (see Figure 1 on page 8 of the
Exchange Working Group report submitted to the council on