Two years ago IT Services made the decision to "sunset" our Sun Microsystems' infrastructure in order to simply our data center operations. Projects have been conducted since then to re-design our enterprise architecture around directory, identity management, course management, web collaboration, and email. All areas are now either midway through transition or completed.
Last year, UAA decided to migrate all faculty/staff email to Microsoft's Exchange mail. This decision leverages our existing Voice-over-IP technology permitting users with "unified messaging" and also creates a solid integration for calendaring and future advanced services. We were also very concerned about potential security and privacy issues that outsource options like Google and Live@edu could not satisfactorily resolve for us.
We have been reviewing student email during the past six months and believe our best course of action is to outsource student email. A student survey in the past two months showed that most respondents already used either Gmail or Hotmail anyway. After discussing this with other UA CIO's and discussing OIT's recent Gmail migration we have agreed that UAA should leverage OIT's work in doing a Gmail deployment for student mail at UAA.
I'm sure there will be much more about this project appearing here in the months to come.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Possible deal breaker... In an engineering work session yesterday we found that students would not be able to keep their @uaa.alaska.edu mail addresses and would migrate to @alaska.edu mail addresses. This is problematic for student mail forwarding and UAA affinity/branding.
ReplyDeleteRich, I just found your blog. Good stuff, I hope you keep writing more. Will this effort "fuse" with the existing statewide effort? For instance, I am an employee at SW, but I want to take classes at UAA again. Will I still have two email accounts as I do now? Or will it merge to one?
ReplyDelete-David Woodley