Laurence,

 

It is my understanding from the discussions at the last IT Exchange that MSU was /NOT/ pursuing a centralized Exchange server for students, faculty or staff in the near future.  Also discussed was the gMail/Google Apps debate in which it was announced that MSU felt it was best to keep business functions (email, calendaring, etc) in house, where we can guarantee its safety, privacy and reliability.  

 

The current webmail (ATS mail, let me know if I am speaking out of turn), was chosen from a variety of solutions as being the best, cost effective solution that we could deploy this year.  Many others were considered, and IMP was the best way to keep the existing infrastructure (reuse storage, etc), but put a new, functional and useable skin on the webmail.   Heck, it even allows students to make text bold and red.

 

There are lots of different platforms out there, but many don’t scale as large as we need.  We are getting near to 200,000 mailboxes, each with at least 128MB of storage, many growing to as much as 1GB.  The current solution has calendaring built-in (but does not allow shared calendaring, yet?). 

 

-Nick Kwiatkowski

 MSU Telecom Systems

 

 

I was surprised to find this morning that a new email system has been announced.  Yes, I know, it’s only a new web interface but it will be perceived as a new email system and so we may as well acknowledge that.  A part of my confusion is that I was under the impression that ATS was investigating the use of Microsoft Exchange for faculty and staff.  If that is the case then college administrators should know about this plan before deciding what to do about the new web front end to Mail.  ⨪ 

And here comes the difficult part since I don’t want to be either unkind or to ignore fiscal limitations, but the second part of my confusion is the quite frankly klunky nature of the proposed web interface for Mail.  I understand the problems in building an add-on to a home brewed system, and I am not necessarily opposed to local development of some systems.  They have their place, but the bar has already been raised for email and calendaring systems and expectations are necessarily high. 

 

For what it is worth, I am moving towards the view that, rather than concede email and calendar development to Google, which this new interface effectively does, MSU should be aggressively seeking to build a full-fledged MSU community with real-time unified communications – i.e. state of the art point-of-presence, email and calendar pushing to iPod Touch devices (for example), Pre-filled calendar class schedules for students, pre-built class email lists, readily available web conferencing, and multi-point video conferencing between students and faculty. 

 

These tools are available today, and no, they are not cheap, but then neither is a less than optimally effective and motivated student body or a less-than-committed alumni group.  If MSU has set its goals on becoming a world integrating community, then community building, in my view, had best begin at home.

 

http://www.wainhouse.com/files/papers/wr-case-sfsu.pdf

 

http://www.wrplatinum.com/Downloads/8808.aspx

 

The last URL requires registration but all .msu.edu email addresses have automatic access to Wainhouse Research Platinum Pro material until June of 2009.

 

Laurence A. Bates

College of Education

Michigan State University

217E Erickson Hall

East Lansing

MI 48824

517-355-2178

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