Ramblings & Musings

On 4-Dec-06, at 3:31 PM, Eugene Siciunas wrote:

Greetings:

CNS is inviting your comments and concerns with respect to a
proposal to replace the existing UTORschedule service with a service
based on Microsoft Exchange technology. We have scheduled two "Town
Hall" type meetings to demonstrate the advantages and new functionality
being offered in this proposal. The meetings will be on Tuesday,
December 12 and Friday, December 15 at 2:00 in Room 1200 of the Bahen
Centre for IT. Please indicate your interest in attending by sending a
note to: exchange@utoronto.ca in order to give us an idea of the amount
of refreshments to provide.

I am not using mail @utoronto.ca (well I have an account with the forwarding) and only occasionally use Oracle calendar (when I am the member of the Dept Space Committee which needs to schedule together with the certain University services. However the whole idea does not look right for me.

1) It is not clear if users of @utoronto.ca will be able to use any POP, IMAP client or web front end to send/receive their mail or they will be forced to use specific Microsoft client. The latter would be move in the completely wrong direction. My spam-client log shows that Outlook Express and Office Outlook are vehicles for spam and account for 95% of all spam sent to me.

2) It looks like to use Calendar one will need to install certain MS software on their computers. It means exclusion of Linux/Unix users for sure and probably Macintosh Users as well.

``Macintosh and Linux users will be dealt on the case-per-case basis''

What about AIX/IRIX and other Unix users? Why one cannot use Web interface? There are plenty of calendars of this type.

Kicking out not-Windows users I would consider as absolutely intolerable. I use Macs and I know that there is Outluck Excess for it but I keep my Macs clean of M$ crapware.

Appended below is the Executive Summary from our "Proposal for the
Replacement of the Existing UTORmail/UTORschedule Email and Calendaring
Systems with a Microsoft Exchange Environment for the Faculty and Staff
of the University of Toronto". The full text of the proposal is
available at:

https://www.utorid.utoronto.ca/cgi-bin/employee/exchangefinal.pdf

In order to maintain the confidentiality of the proposal, we ask that
you use your UTORid and password to access the site. (This is the user
id and password you currently use to access UTORmail and UTORschedule).

This invitation is being sent to all the users of UTORschedule, since
they will be the most affected by the proposal. Also receiving this
notice will be members of the Computing Management Board (CMB), the
Academic Computing and Tech-Ops committees and the nw and ut admins groups.

The process for evaluating this proposal begins with the December town
hall meetings with the UTORschedule end user community and with the
technical staff supporting them. A proposal of this scale can be
expected to raise a number of questions and CNS intends to work with
UTORschedule users after they have had time to digest the information so
as to address their concerns. We hope the process will culminate in
positive responses percolating up from the users and staff to their
department chairs, and thence to the deans and finally to the CMB. A
successful conclusion would be the CMB's recommendation to the Vice
president and Provost to fund this proposal.

Thanking you in advance for your interest,

Eugene Siciunas
Director, Computing and Networking Services

**********************************************************************

Why they hire Windoze losers to the job?

Executive Summary

The use of calendaring and email by faculty and staff has become
critical to fulfilling the mission of the University. The institutional
services, UTORschedule and UTORmail have fallen behind in terms of
meeting the availability and functionality demands of its users. The
email processors are not redundant, causing outages in the event of
failure or maintenance activity. While stored messages are protected
against disk drive failures, they remain susceptible to system problems,
corruption, human error or user deletion, and since current backups
require a five-day cycle, up to five days~R worth of messages could be
lost. When users exceed their storage quotas of 120MB, they can no
longer receive email until their storage is reduced.

All of these situations are incompatible with a mission-critical
service. Users demand better functionality and a seamless environment
for client-based and web access to email and calendar functions, such as
the ability to share address books and folders, have the same address
book, regardless of mode of access, the same web interface as with a
desk-top client, integration with PDAs, better performing mailing list
distribution, the ability to implement end-to-end encryption of email
messages etc. These are functional features necessary in a
mission-critical service.

The recommended solution to address these deficiencies is the deployment
of a Microsoft Exchange environment for those faculty and staff that use
UTORschedule and UTORmail.

This environment would use redundant procesors, with active fail-over,
fault-tolerant storage with a daily, impact-free, backup regimen with a
two-week retention period to safeguard against data loss. Storage quotas
would be at least three times greater than current levels. This solution
will provide seamless integration of email, webmail and calendaring,
with the same look and feel and access from office, home or Internet
café, anytime. The homogeneity of the Exchange environment will afford
an opportunity to plan end-to-end encryption of email messages to
satisfy FIPPA requirements.

The community of faculty and staff that currently use UTORschedule and
UTORmail is expected to grow to 5,000 within the five-year context of
this proposal. The Exchange environment can be made available to all
faculty and staff, subject to the capacity of the servers and storage.
Usage beyond the assumed population of 5,000 may need additional
funding, but scalability is not an issue. Expansion to students could be
contemplated once experience has been gained with the performance and
support costs of Exchange.

Since the costs of maintaining and supporting two calendaring products
would be onerous and unacceptable, a short transition period is
expected, after which the Oracle calendar would cease to be supported.
Faculty and staff that only use UTORmail need not change at all, unless
they wish to avail themselves of the additional functionality and look
and feel of Outlook. Clearly, this proposal has no effect at all on
those that use neither UTORmail nor UTORschedule. Faculty and staff that
use UTORschedule and a departmental email system may continue to use
their departmental email system, but will have to check Outlook for
calendar messages. Users of both UTORmail and UTORschedule must use
Outlook or Outlook Web Access (OWA) to access both. This is how the
promise of seamless integration is best achieved.

Alternative products offering calendar and email integration, such as
Lotus Notes, Groupwise and Oracle~Rs Collaboration Suite have been
considered and found lacking. While they may have similar functionality
to that of Exchange, they do not integrate as well as Exchange with
other standard Microsoft products and have no other presence on campus,
unlike the existing five campus implementations of Exchange. This is an
opportunity to build on existing Exchange expertise on campus and
consolidate the IT environment rather than further fragmenting it. No
open source product offers the functionality and integration desired.

The expected one time only and base costs of implementing this proposal
are $1,631,975 and $190,183 respectively. From a different perspective,
the five year blended total costs would be $2,535,819, which for a user
population of 5,000 yields a per user per year cost of $101. After the
five years, a new infusion of funds would be required to update the
server and storage hardware, but would attract a new three or four year
warranty, reducing maintenance costs. Any growth in the number of users
or storage requirements beyond the proposed quota during the five years
would need additional funding to permit that growth.

What a waste!!!

This proposal will be initially distributed to the present UTORschedule
users for their consideration and they will be invited to ~STown Hall~T
type discussions and demonstrations of the capabilities of the products
being proposed.

Any time I watched anything from M$, I was very happy that I am not using this :-) Few times I was forced to use M$ products and this was a cruel and unusual punishment.

All will be encouraged to provide feedback to the
funding authorities, to permit informed decisions.

How about responding timely to my comments?

--
Eugene Siciunas, Good decisions come from wisdom,
Director, Wisdom comes from experience,
Computing & Networking Services, Experience comes from bad decisions.
University of Toronto,
255 Huron Street, Suite 350, Hans Christian Andersen
Toronto, M5S 3J1,
P: 416-978-5058, F: 416-971-2085

Microsoft crapware user, he is lamer, he is loser!!!

==============================================================
Victor Ivrii, FRSC, Professor, Department of Mathematics, University of Toronto,
40 St.George Str., Toronto, Ontario M5S 2E4, Canada
office: ES 4141

(416)978-4031 (of), (416)978-4107 (fax)
ivrii@math.toronto.edu

==============================================================
WWW home page:
http://www.math.toronto.edu/ivrii/

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