Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

We spent considerable time talking about the proposed project to migrate our current Meeting Maker users to outlook/exchange during our last Technology Planning Group meeting. I promised to write about it, so here we go…

Before we begin, I should say that we had a great time at our friend Ravi’s house last night watching the Superbowl. Lots of food, drinks colored according to which team one supports (I was a minority group of brownish color drink while most people there had blue) and yes, we did bet. I have a terrific record of winning there… Our son Varun, a huge colts fan, bet on Colts while I bet on Chicago by 3 (I know I was dreaming… but I was hedging this in a way that as a family we will come out winning). Varun won $20 (on a $6 bet) and I won $9 (I bet that Chicago will score first and that the first penalty will be a false start by the Colts)… You would call that luck… However, I had run through my complex modeling program to precisely predict these two. My computer didn’t have enough power to predict the final outcome, so I had to kill it and leave for the party…

Now that I got that out of the way…

For the past several years we have been asked why is it that we have Meeting Maker, a separate calendaring program and that some feel is not functionally adequate. Eventually everyone gets used to it because that is what everyone uses. We have avoided the question successfully because this used to be only a few users. But, recently we have been getting this question from many more users and especially new staff who are coming from other organizations that use outlook/exchange. And since one of our functions as a service organization is to listen to what the users want, we feel that now is a good time to take this project on.

As is customary with ITS, we have discussed this in many settings and have tried to explain the reasons and requirements. However, I heard that this was not made clear, so I am trying to do it here. In my mind, the following are the criteria that should drive this discussion:

• A combined calendar/email solution
• Better support for the new line of PDAs such as the Palm devices and Blackberries
• Integration with other calendar aware software such as the scheduling software

And most importantly, the users are specifically asking for outlook/exchange. So, if we have an alternate solution, it must be at least as good as outllok/exchange from hte user’s perspective.

When we talked about this and alternatives, it became clear that Outlook/Exchange is probably the only solution. It may also imply that these criteria were chosen in such a way that no other solution would qualify. I can tell you that it was not a conscious decision to do that. However, when we listened to the scheduling software vendors, when we talked about calendar integration, almost always everyone talked about only Exchange integration… Same thing with Blackberry integration.

Therefore, we would like to proceed to develop an implementation plan. Before we go there, I also want to make a couple of things clear:

• We plan to move ONLY the users who use Meeting Maker to the outlook/exchange environment.
• We will continue to support the current infrastructure for students (Cyrus backend). Thanks to a lot of work from the Unix admins, especially Matt, this is working out really well.
• We plan to offer migration to Cyrus for anyone who wishes to move who are not Meeting Maker users. This will be most of the faculty members. The benefits are a much faster mail experience, especially on the Webmail end. The downside is, once when the transition happens, the emails on the server will be downloaded a second time to Eudora like clients, causing duplicates.

So, as far as this being a change, we are talking about all the administrative staff (of course, how one defines this has been debated) and a few other staff who use meeting maker. James Taft and Joanne are forming a group together to plan this out.

I feel that the best approach to rolling this out is to first roll out outlook as a client. It is very different from Eudora, so users will need time to get used to it and learn how it works. If we can get started now, it will give users several months to get used to outlook. There is again considerable discussion about whether the outlook as a client will look different now vs when the backend is exchange. Based on what I have heard, the look and feel is not going to be that different, but the the underlying principles will be very different.

POP3 users are so used to having all their emails and attachments on their local drive. The best way to operate in Exchange environment is to do it in IMAP like fashion where all emails stay on the server. There are methods to do offline dumps for those who travel and cannot be connected to the internet, but for majority of the users, leaving all the mail on the exchange server will be a welcome change. This is because, it will be less clutter on their hard drive, they don’t have to worry about copying all of it when their machine is replaced, they don’t have to worry about the backups (because the server will be backed up) and above all, the Data and Network Security group is recommending that administrative users minimize saving emails and most importantly attachments on their hard drives for security reasons.

I certainly do not want to minimize that this is a very hard project. However, I also think, we need to do it for reasons mentioned above. If we all work together, develop a realistic plan and plan to get external help as needed (we know that we will need this to transfer Meeting Maker data to Exchange) we can do this. There are many other institutions that are doing it, and several others have recently migrated to it. There are a lot of good ideas floating around, and James has a lot of knowledge in this front (he administered Exchange in his previous job), so I am not worried that in the end we will have a very good transition plan…