[csg fall 2004] email workshop - Harvard's presentation

We're at the Sheraton Commander in Cambridge, across the street from where a tree used to stand that supposedly was the place where George Washington accepted command of the Continental Army in the 1770s. That tree was mistakenly cut down by a Cambridge street worker in the 1920s. The subsequent fate of the city worker was not mentioned :)

Vace notes that 1/3 of his staff are involved with supporting email

From the informal survey, institutions identify over 30% of email is spam or virus email. That sounds low to me, at least from our UW experience.

Susan DeLellis - Harvard - Evaluating Email/Calendar Soutions

Harvard email environment - about 50k accounts, 60% students. less than 5k calendar accounts. Currently Central Admin provides for-fee service, individual schools (8) provide accounts, plus others, using lots of different solutions. No central authentication for email or calendaring (but there is a harvard ID/pin system used for applications and wireless authentication).

Central IT provides a central email aliasing service (first_lastname@harvard.edu). There is a central voice-mail to email service.

There is a University-wide email broadcast applications (presmailer) developed for emergency and cticial university correspondences.

They sent out a suvery to users - 13% of 6300 email customers responded.

97% rated email as most important communications services (over phone and mobile phone service!)
Provide better integration between calendar and email and IM (single client)
Provide more robust web client and remote access
Improve reliabilty of claendar system
develop central group calendar system

Focus groups with staff and managers
- reliability of messaging is critical
- effectiveness of antispam and antivirus solutions directly impacts day-day productivity
- remote access growing in importance
- sensitive to change and cost

Did an RFP and got back around a dozen reponses
- emergence of collaboration suites, including file sharing, portals, web conferencing, unified messaging, IM in addition to email and calendar.
- how does that integrate with existing solutions and tools - what's the right infrastructure?
- clear trend towards database architectures as the message store.

Initial TCO show total proices in the $8-12/user/mo range. Fully loaded cost includes hw, sw, maintenance, facilities, monitoring, backups, storage, labor, disaster recovery, implementation, training and help desk services.