“In short, things are in progress.”
This is how Stan North Martin, director of outreach, communications & consulting with the Office of Information Technology chose to summarize the ongoing developments in moving faculty and other staff from older IT platforms to newer email and calendar programs, including Google apps, which is currently used by students.
In an information session held for OIT staff at the D.H. Hill auditorium Thursday, Martin along with a group of others spoke on three major issues currently being handled by their office. The first was an overview of the implementation of Google’s Postini service for antivirus, anti-spam and archiving operations.
Harry Nicholos, assistant director for systems and hosted services, elaborated on the advantages of using Postini.
“Postini has helped the University accomplish two primary goals: unification of anti-spam and antivirus software, and the ability to archive emails for legal discovery,” Nicholos said. “A bonus to this was that people are now able to do personal archiving on their own.”
Currently, about 2000 messages are processed per minute by Postini, with over 15,200 under the ambit of its anti-spam and antivirus usage. For archiving, Postini is utilized by approximately 10,200 users on campus. These archiving functions are only used for certain employees. Students, however, have been shifted to what Nicholos called “Google-ware,” accounts not covered by Postini for either security or archiving purposes.
Regarding Postini’s quarantine services, Nicholos said emails are sent out daily with information about the past 24 hours of quarantined messages, which remain quarantined for 14 days before deletion.
Discussing some of the major concerns about Postini, Nicholos spoke about falsely quarantined items, among others.
“Some of the prominent issues concerning Postini are about false positive quarantined items, quarantined CC-ed (carbon copied) messages and bounces at the receiver’s site,” Nicholos said,” “Postini only quarantines inbound messages. Emails bouncing at the receiver’s end have nothing to do with Postini.”
The second issue was with the WolfWise upgrade to GroupWise 8. According to the OIT website, the GroupWise system, used by faculty, administration and staff offers primarily email and calendar services. This enables individual, group and resource scheduling with web access, allowing people access to calendars and other data from virtually anywhere.
Marc Cloutier, associate director for unified communications spoke on the upgrade,
“The GroupWise upgrade went pretty well. It solved not all, but a lot of our problems,” Cloutier said.
WolfWise is also supported on mobile devices, and Cloutier elaborated on the response of the upgrade for mobile users.
“For iPhone users, life is good because installation is very easy,” Cloutier said. “For Android users, it depends on what version and phone you are using.”
There are 7,004 accounts using GroupWise services at the University and use a total of 957 resource calendars and 63 GB of data.
Martin and Dan Green, director of information technology, also spoke at length about the migration from the University’s Unity email system to Google Apps.
“We’ve moved a lot of students over the past year, and they are generally very happy with Google. The Helpdesk also has positive responses regarding this,” Martin said.
There are currently about 50,000 active accounts on Google, and the University is not going to create any more Unity accounts for students, which are used by the faculty and staff at the University.
Green added that the rough timeline for achieving this migration is by this summer.
“We hope to transition all Unity accounts to Google Apps by this summer—I can’t say for sure whether it’s mid-summer, early summer or the end of summer, but it’ll be done by then.”
There are no rigid, fixed deadlines for completing this migration, but the University has divided the process into multiple, convenient phases.
The first step in the process, of creating a migration tool has already been completed and currently migrants are allowed by invitation only.
“We are moving groups in batches, fixing and resolving issues in between. The invitees are developing support documentation for the migration,” Green said, “This will be followed by an Opt-in period, wherein most of the documentation will be available and we will be asking people if they are willing to migrate to Google Apps. After they opt in, we will have them verify with their local IT support and supervisors and shift them over. This will include both groups and individuals.”
After this period, the accounts which have not yet opted to migrate will be removed structurally or scheduled to move all at once, in coordination with their local IT support.
However, Green said he hopes the majority of the users will agree to shift to Google during the opt-in period, and thus reduce the hassle during transitioning between the two systems.
“We have an advantage that a lot of these people are already using their personal Gmail accounts, so they know what to expect, especially some of the essential features such as Google Docs,” Green said.
