Calendar

A new campus-wide Calendar, too.

Currently ICT Services support the campus-wide scheduling application Oracle Calendar. The Exchange environment includes its own scheduling environment integrated with the system. Staff will interact with the Calendar using the same clients they use for email: Outlook on the PC and Entourage on the Macintosh. It is unclear at the moment if the Oracle Calendar will be moved over to Exchange when the ICT Services Exchange 2003 Server comes into production in March this year, or whether the changeover will happen with the move to Exchange 2007 next year.

Email migration

Now that Divisional Home Directories and Shares have been migrated to ICT Services, the next project is to migrate email from the cemail server (also known as isaac) to ICT Services. While the Division should be aware of this project, it is unlikely to have any impact on staff use of email until, at the earliest, late this year.

In March 2007 ICT Services will pilot Exchange 2003 with Development and International, to iron out any problems. It will then roll Exchange 2003 out across the other areas of the University not currently on Exchange (HDS and the other non-Academic Divisions). COMEDU and BLIS are already using Exchange 2003 so there will be no noticeable impact on either Division during this stage (COMEDU and BLIS will continue to host their staff email on their existing servers: the rest of the University will be hosted on an ICT Services Exchange 2003 Server).

After Semester 2, 2007, ICT Services will implement Exchange 2007 on a new server. Over the summer break 2007-2008, all users (including BLIS and COMEDU users) will be migrated to the new Exchange 2007 Server. After the migration to the ICT Services’ Exchange 2007 Server, BLIS and COMEDU will be able to decommission their Divisional servers.

Sometime this year ICT Services’ disk images for staff will contain Outlook 2003 (PC) or Entourage 2004 (Macintosh) as a part of a rollout of Office 2003 (PC) and Office 2004 (Macintosh). While most of the Division’s staff computers will support Office 2003/2004, it is too early to say whether the Division will get the new images this year or deploy them widely. We will probably wait until 2008 before updating across the board, when there will be a move to use Office 2007 (PC) or 2008 (Macintosh) to support Exchange 2007.

The move to Office 2007 (PC) and Office 2008 (Macintosh) in 2008 will be a major change since the new Office suites are radically different to previous versions. Significant staff training will be required to ensure the transition is smooth. There may also be some problems with older hardware that doesn't run these new Office suites satisfactorily: more research is required before the impact of the changeover can be determined with any accuracy.

Once the new Office suites are in place, support will only be provided for Outlook (PC) and Entourage (Macintosh) as email (and Calendar: see following item on Calendar migration) clients. While Divisional staff will not be required to use these clients, the then current versions of Outlook and Entourage will be the only ones supported. Nothing will be done specifically to prevent staff using whatever email client they can get to work to access their email, but they won't be supported if they need assistance.

Off-campus access to email will also change. Staff will need to use a Virtual Private Network, or VPN, connection to the campus network to be allowed access to their email and calendar from anywhere outside the campus. There will be some difficulties with this approach (user training, infrastructure and capacity within the University to support VPN connections, VPN clients on computers used by staff outside the University to access the services here, configuration help and support, and so on) that will need to be monitored and addressed as the system is implemented.

Centralisation of email

The University is moving forward on the planned centralisation of email and integrating a new campus-wide calendaring environment.

A (rather large) working group has been established to organise the migration of email and calendar services to a central email, calendaring, address list and document sharing system under ICT Services. The University Information Management Systems Committee (UIMSC) recently accepted the recommendations of a report compiled by Acumen Alliance to establish a central collaborative system based on Microsoft’s Exchange and Sharepoint services.

Debate is currently centred around the choice of version for the Exchange Server environment: the current version, Exchange 2003, is in use in BLIS and COMEDU, but Microsoft is due to release Exchange 2007 Real Soon Now. 2007 would be a preferred environment based on the expected functionality it would bring, but experience has shown that it is reasonable to expect some delays in the availability of a suitably stable version for enterprise use when such a major release is made available.

The expectation is that email will be operating centrally by the end of the first quarter of 2007 (31 March 2007). Should an enterprise-ready version of Exchange 2007 be available from Microsoft in time for a thoroughly-tested service to be deployed by that time, then the email should be hosted by ICT Services then.

Currently the University has available to it a centrally-provided electronic calendar (Oracle Calendar). BLIS users also have a calendar in Exchange 2003 (as do COMEDU users), but in order to manage appointments and meetings across Divisions, the Oracle Calendar needs to be used. Exchange has an integrated calendar that will replace Oracle Calendar. Migration strategy, roll-out plans and a timetable for Exchange Calendar are yet to be determined.

Once email and calendar functions are operating, document sharing using Sharepoint will be implemented. Again no plans or a timetable are in place for the implementation of Sharepoint. In the meantime document sharing is being managed by the Divisions and ICT Services on an ‘at-need’ basis.

Enterprise Collaboration Software

After four years of discussions, some progress on an Enterprise Collaboration Environment.

At its meeting on Thursday 17 August 2006 the University Information Management Systems Committee (UIMSC) endorsed the recommendations of an Acumen Alliance consultancy report that concluded that Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Sharepoint Portal Server are the best functional fit for the University to support email, calendaring, contact lists, task lists and file sharing as an enterprise-wide system for staff.

UIMSC has established a working group consisting of the IT Managers of the Academic Divisions and some ICT personnel to prepare an implementation plan.

The Division of Communication and Education has been using Exchange for email for a number of years now, so the transition from a Divisional-supported email system to a University-provided system should not be too problematic and require little adjustment if any for most staff in the Division. Existing Outlook and Entourage users should experience no differences after some settings are adjusted.

The movement of the calendar from the Oracle system to Exchange will require more work especially with staff training and support for those staff who don’t currently use a Calendar, or don’t use Microsoft Outlook or Entourage as their email client. In the longer term to move to Exchange Calendar across the campus should provide a much more integrated system for managing scheduling and communication than the current environment allows.

Implementation and use of the Sharepoint document sharing system is an unknown quantity at the moment since it is a completely new system for the Division. Certainly an ongoing commitment to training and support within the Division will be required if document sharing is to be used actively and appropriately in the Division.

The email and address list stage of the project at least should be in place by the end of this year.

Campus Collaborative software

A new direction to integrate email and provide campus-wide collaborative software.

At a meeting help on Monday, 27 March 2006, PVC Research and Information Management announced that the University was seeking external consultants’ advice on the selection of an appropriate campus-wide collaborative tool (to manage, for example, email, calendar, address book, task lists and file-sharing).

PVC R&IM was asked to ensure that the consultants spoke with the Academic Divisions to identify their needs, and that they were asked to include plans for the deployment of their proposed solution within the UC environment in their report.