"With GroupWise everything is a third-party add-on -- for example, to enable unified communications -- which adds layers of complexity and licensing," Holt says."Quest had tools for migrating from GroupWise to Exchange and I thought about a cloud offering which might offer higher availability and work the same from everywhere. It would also provide tools to collaborate." Holt presented the idea to the executive group in mid-February and commenced the migration at the beginning of April. By the end of April everybody at the museum was using Outlook in the cloud.

"It was probably four weeks planning and three weeks to migrate and upgrade," she says. "We have then 'backfilled' people's mailboxes through May and June." The museum experienced "minimal" loss of productivity during the migration and the 25GB mailbox space and IM service has been well received by Gen-Y and executive staff alike. Holt has been an IT professional for 17 years, mostly in the education sector and says "given how most IT projects can go" the transition was relatively smooth.

In keeping with government regulations, the museum tendered for at least three quotes for the projects and looked at exchange hosting, Telstra's T-Suite "which had more apps" and Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Standard Suite (BPOS) offering. Microsoft's BPOS won the deal and now executives are using Windows mobile phones to access e-mail on the road. Holt says the project has changed her view of cloud and, with a CRM project due at end of the year, she will look at cloud offerings.

Next on the agenda is a move to IP telephony and integrate voice with Outlook for a true unified messaging environment with click-to-call. A new PABX may need to be installed on site, but over next two years the vision is to have all voice and messaging converged and in the cloud. The museum currently uses a hosted analogue telephony service from Telstra with voicemail running on an NT4 system.

With a successful cloud project behind it, the museum will continue to modernise its internal IT systems.