Crossing the bridge while you build it

Abstract

This paper accompanies a panel discussion by members of the computing support staff at Georgetown University, The University of Kansas, and The University of Oregon. Each school migrated its customers to a new e-mail system; some of the migrations included other services, such as web hosting and calendaring.Georgetown University migrated from a GroupWise mail and calendaring system and UNIX mail to Netscape (now iPlanet) Messaging Server and Steltor CorporateTime. Computing support staff learned a few things in the process: time spent ahead of time analyzing the scope of the project will save time during the migration; users will not migrate voluntarily, so it is important to set a firm deadline and stick to it; and users need more help than you think they will, especially faculty.The University of Kansas migrated its e-mail service from a wide variety of systems to a central Microsoft Exchange server, with most customers using Microsoft Outlook as their client. Computing staff spent extra time with faculty and staff, arranged relationships with departmental superusers, and migrated students using an automated on-line process.The University of Oregon's School of Architecture and Allied Arts retired an aging Linux server that was providing web hosting, e-mail accounts, and e-mail list service. Since the server was small, with only a few dozen accounts, it was possible to give personal attention to each customer who needed to be migrated. All of the services were moved to the central Computing Center's servers, while maintaining e-mail forwarding and virtual domains for web hosting.Although our migrations of e-mail and other services varied in scale and complexity, all of them involved similar steps: recognition of a problem to be solved, analysis of the options, assessment of what it will take to make the transition from the old way to the new way, and considerable hand-holding on the way to the other side.