The University of Pittsburgh's Computing Services and Systems Development organization is focused on the needs of the faculty and student population, totaling nearly 40,000 users. Computing Services and Systems Development has operated the Help Desk call center 24 hours per day, 7 days per week for nearly two years. Concurrent with the establishment of the 24 hour Help Desk was an effort to create an online information resource that would serve as a repository of institutional-specific knowledge.During the past two years, IT resources have been centralized and expanded to provide customers with a single Web site from which they will obtain all IT information and software support tools. These include an enhanced version of the knowledge base currently offered to the University community, integrated Help Desk support tools allowing customers to create and view the status of support requests, and the provision of automated system tools.
As the University of Pittsburgh's reliance on the Internet grows, electronic mail has become a cornerstone of the campus culture. An enterprise-wide, scaleable and client-server based e-mail solution is integral to a meaningful educational experience for all students, regardless of their area of study.
The University of Pittsburgh began the Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) Project in the spring of 1997 as an evaluation project investigating the replacement options for the legacy e-mail systems and a POP3 service. The project was initially divided into two phases---Phase 1 to deploy an IMAP server for campuswide use and Phase 2 to identify and provide a reliable, high quality, enterprise-wide IMAP client. A sub-group of the IMAP project team was formed to identify requirements and evaluate clients. Cyrusoft International's Mulberry was found to meet the ever changing requirements of the campus computing labs and have sufficient features and functionality that users would be compelled to switch from their legacy clients to the new environment.A critical third phase was added to the IMAP project which required a phase-out of the legacy e-mail systems by April 1, 2000 and the provision of a standard graphical client-server e-mail system for both the Macintosh and Windows platforms to all students, faculty and staff.The presentation will describe the third and final phase of the project in detail, discuss the issues surrounding how legacy e-mail users were kept informed, trained and migrated to new IMAP client.The presenters will identify the obstacles as we approached the deadline for full conversion to the IMAP protocol and the phase-out of all other e-mail systems on the University of Pittsburgh campus. Extensive use of user logs, forwarding data and distribution was critical to the process. The final phase involved the migration of 25,000 users from VMS Mail, Unix Pine and POP mail to the new environment by April 1, 2000.
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