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At the information sessions hosted in late-April and early May, the Task Force received several questions about the process of assessing potential replacements for BlitzMail and Oracle Calendar. Here are the replies to those questions.
Making the decision
Why are we replacing BlitzMail?
There are three major reasons we are looking to replace Blitz: its age, the risk it presents, and its lack of functionality.
Age: BlitzMail was developed at Dartmouth College about 20 years ago and has been widely adopted by students, staff, faculty, and alumni.
Over the years, DHMC assumed responsibility for supporting new features on the Windows version of Blitz and the College assumed responsibility for the Mac version. DHMC halted development on the Windows version of BlitzMail client several years ago. Development on the Mac version consequently slowed—as it became clear that Blitz would not be able to keep pace with commercially available email clients or with technological and software changes.
Risk: The Blitz email system, developed and supported by the College, now puts the College at risk because of the limited number of staff who can support the system.
Functionality: Increasing numbers of students, faculty, and staff would like an email system that has more functionality and that integrates with the calendar system. In surveys of faculty, staff, and students, all groups listed features that they would like that are common in commercially available email systems. And in the surveys of faculty, staff and students, only a minority of respondents did not want to move off of Blitz to a fuller featured system.
Who is TEC-T?
TEC-T is the Taskforce on Email and Collaboration Technologies. Faculty, staff, students, and alumni advisors make up its membership.
What's the process for making this decision?
The Taskforce will meet in May to formulate recommendations for mail and calendaring, based on its investigations of available options and on extensive consultation with Dartmouth stakeholders. These recommendations will then go to the Council on Computing, whose opinions will then go to the senior administration. The final decision will be made by the senior administration, based on the information that the Taskforce and the Council have provided.
Why the June 15 decision date?
If the College can come to a decision by June 15th, Computing Services can use the summer to develop an implementation plan and possibly be ready for a pilot in the fall. TEC-T has been meeting for over a year on this issue.
When will the transition occur and who will be affected when?
If Dartmouth College changes its email system, everyone will be affected: students, faculty, staff and alumni. People who already use another client with Blitzmail (Thunderbird, Outlook, Apple Mail) will be less affected because most likely they will be able to use that same client with the new system.
The timeline for implementing the change will be determined this summer, and most likely the new system will be rolled out in a phased approach in the next 12-18 months. There will not be an abrupt transition; rather, every user will have a window, probably of several months duration, during which they will migrate to the new system. More information about the implementation will be available on this website and will be communicated with the community as it becomes available along with any directions you will need or where to go for help.
What about employees at Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center?
DHMC has also studied changing email systems for the same reasons as the College. Their studies have concluded and they are now implementing a pilot of Microsoft's Outlook/Exchange application.
Will there be any training?
Yes, there will be training. Training will be built into the implementation plan.
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Features being assessed in the new systems
What systems are you assessing?
The Task Force is evaluating hosted Microsoft Live email and calendaring and the Google Mail and calendaring system.
Why aren't we hosting a service here?
Implementing a full-featured service, for the full community that meets all of the major requirements would incur significant additional expense. The Taskforce decided to focus on hosted solutions based upon two lines of reasoning:
- Financial: the economic climate at the College is causing us to think differently about the services we provide and how we are providing them. Replacing Blitz with a service that the College would manage would add expenses. The Taskforce decided it would be valuable to investigate whether hosted solutions could meet the email and calendaring needs of the College, without incurring additional expenses.
- Availability of a reliable service: hosted email/calendaring solutions are not new to the market and have been tested by corporations and educational institutions. Many of our peers have moved or are in the process of moving their students and alumni to hosted solutions.
What requirements are you looking at?
A list of requirements is at our web site. Some basic ones are:
- providing more storage space
- the ability to use HTML
- ease of sending and receiving attachments
- searching the full messages by keyword
- having nested folders
- and using non-Latin characters
What are all the operating systems, platforms, and mobile devices did you test the new systems on? Will new products work on all of these?
The list of operating systems, platforms and devices is found under the Testing and Evaluation section. Both of the systems worked with most of them, but neither system worked with all of them.
What kind of storage space will we have?
Google provides 7 GB per user and Microsoft provides 10 GB per user.
Are the staff and student calendars going to be separate?
Our goal is to have an integrated calendaring system.
What have other colleges or universities said about using these tools? What were the questions you asked them?
A list of the questions is posted on our web site. Based on their responses, we will create a report that summarizes the comments and experiences of the other schools. This report will help us to distinguish between the products as well as give us insights into the work involved in maintaining the systems. The report will not include direct quotes or the full answers from these interviewees. When we asked schools if they would spend time answering questions, we informed them that their exact answers would be treated confidentially. Each school has an ongoing relationship with one of the providers that we would not want to complicate by posting exact quotes.
How are we going to migrate existing email and calendar data?
Both vendors provide tools for migration. Institutions who have adopted hosted email have found that many of their email users were able to migrate their mail without assistance.
Migrating calendar information is more difficult and individuals may need to do manual migration. This would be the case even if we did not move to a hosted solution.
Are there test environments where we can test these out without signing up to Gmail or MS?
No. The testing team has an environment but we have not opened it up to others. If we make a decision on one service, we may open up a test environment for others to use.
These are going to generate load on the external network, versus blitz which is internal. What will that load be and how will it be accommodated?
We are measuring the traffic load going to the Blitz servers, and will take that into account when planning current and future Internet capacity needs.
Will you be talking more about collaboration tools?
Both Google and Microsoft have collaboration tools that are part of the package. However, we believe that we should continue our work and look at related collaboration tools and needs.
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Features we hope to keep from the previous system
Can we use our existing name and password credentials to login to other systems?
We haven't determined what login credentials would be used but our goal is to keep it as simple as possible for the user.
Can we still use Mac Mail or Thunderbird?
Yes, the systems support a number of clients and you could still chose to forward your Dartmouth mail to another email provider.
How will the new system handle nicknames?
Most of the systems have the concept of aliases. We will be working with the new systems to see if we can retain some of the features we now have.
Will the new system allow for Dartmouth directory (DND) lookup?
We believe we will be able to make this or a similar solution possible.
Can we search on hitchcock.org addresses? What about searching for a name that is "similar"?
Hitchcock.org is continuing to support DND lookups of their addresses, and we expect to be able to offer a tool that will allow cross-institutional directory lookups.
Can make an email group private. Can you do that in the new systems?
The systems allow individuals to have private email groups.
Is there a plan for our affiliated-sponsored accounts?
We plan to continue offering email accounts to the same population that has them today.
What will happen to Blitz Bulletins?
Current thinking is that they would become part of an RSS feed service.
Will Dartmouth continue to supply a Key Server?
Yes, although this service is not related to mail and calendaring.
Will be able to keep Dartmouth.edu addresses?
Yes. Even if we use a hosted solution such as Gmail or Microsoft's Live products, our email addresses will remain name@dartmouth.edu
If we move to these services what will be required for use of official correspondence?
As in the past, the College will officially correspond with others using email, mail, web announcements, etc.
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Security and privacy concerns
How will the new system support subpoena requests?
If a legally executed subpoena is served on the vendor, they will comply with it (as would Dartmouth College). Both vendors we are considering state in the contract that they would notify the institution upon receiving the subpoena, if they are legally allowed to do so.
Would you be required to put all your personal information on a public server?
The mail servers are not public servers. They host/store the email that you have sent and received. You decide who to send mail to and you decide which mail you will keep on the system.
If someone clips a wire or cuts off DDS what will happen to these systems?
Dartmouth College has redundant internet connections which take different paths out of Hanover. It is unlikely that both connections would be down, but in the event that they were, all email and all internet connectivity would be affected.
Will you support any local email clients people have? What about local encryption?
It's hard to commit to any clients but both services provide for a wide variety of clients. In general, any email client that supports the IMAP protocol should work with either service.
S/MIME encryption will work fine with either Google or MS using a desktop client (such as Outlook, Apple Mail, or Thunderbird) that does S/MIME. For Google, there's also Firefox plugin to do S/MIME encryption in the web client.
Is there a way to set an expiration date on folders?
No.
How will we be able to migrate emails into document repositories (and stored or deleted along College's policies)?
This is a policy decision, rather than a technical decision. As such, it is being considered by other College groups such as the College Archives, Records Management and the Dartmouth Digital Initiative.
How do you handle someone's corrupted mailbox?
Both vendors provide us with tools to try to recover the mail.
How long a commitment do we have from the vendor? What happens if they say they're no longer free?
We would negotiate that with the providers. 3-4 year contracts are standard with annual renewals after that point. If the provider wanted to charge for the service under a new contract, the terms would be renegotiated.
Will the new system have ads?
Neither system will have ads in the mail or calendaring products for Dartmouth College students, faculty and staff. Our current understanding is that ads will appear in the alumni versions of the products.
Is Google going to be using my personal information for targeting ads?
See http://www.google.com/privacypolicy.html for Google's privacy policy.
Will they refrain from data mining while people are undergraduates?
The contract would not treat undergraduates differently than others who are using this service, except that advertising would not appear on the mail or calendar pages. (Ads would also not appear on faculty and staff pages.)
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For more information and to contact TEC-T
How do I find out more about the assessment process and the transition to a new system?
The TEC-T website will be offering regular updates on the assessment process and will provide links to any other websites that have additional information. You can also send any questions or feedback you have to our email address: TEC-T@dartmouth.edu.
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