The last significant project remaining is the desktop refresh, slated to begin in the second half of the year. This will see about 80 percent of all desktops upgraded to Windows XP and the remaining 20 percent split between Mac OS X and Linux.

"We will support Macs and Linux as part of new environment we are putting in and there are very good business reasons to retain those environments," Barbary said, adding that the benefits for an organization aren't achieved if you use only one operating system.

Thin clients were considered, but the university didn't see them offering a "huge number" of benefits though Barbary said the environment being set up could easily switch to thin clients.

"It's a very comprehensive change of lots of underlying technology," he said. "It's a very complex environment we have with hundreds of applications [and] it takes a huge number of hours to coordinate that. We started the centralization process about three years ago, so support is now central."

Rather than using a large integration partner, the university is working with several - including Commander and Kaz - for various tasks.