Open Letter to UF OIT Staff

UF Exchange Project Underway

The UF Exchange project has taken a big step forward. The project is being organized using three teams: a project team, a management team and a steering committee. Planning and development is being accomplished through the project team consisting of all OIT units with people coming from CNS, AT, UFAD and Academic Affairs. A steering committee is being created to help guide the project. The project will use an "adopter" model in which units can choose to take advantage of the services being offered on an opt-in basis. A guiding principle of the project is to create a service that offers messaging options and features desired by most users at a high quality of service and at a cost below what units can provide independently.

The University currently operates over 150 registered independent e-mail services at an estimated annual cost of over $3 million. Current e-mail services include the centrally-managed Gatorlink mail and Federated MS Exchange systems as well as many individually-managed systems. The quality of these services varies across campus and basic services such as secure e-mail, calendaring and mobile messaging are not available to the majority of faculty and staff.

The UF Exchange Project was initiated in order to offer a high-quality, standard, low-cost service to interested units. Some of the services being included in the planning are: calendaring, disaster recovery, receipt notification, and message recall; also, e-mail lists based on class rolls, affiliation and other groupings will be maintained centrally. These services will be web-accessible as well as from standard desktop clients such as Outlook on Windows, Macs and other computers as well as accessible from mobile phones and Blackberry handhelds. The project will preserve current local e-mail addresses as well as integrate with GatorLink addresses. The service will be authenticated using the campus GatorLink authentication service. The system will be linked with the existing GatorLink Authentication Management system (GLAM) so that mailboxes will be automatically provisioned and deprovisioned based on hiring and other personnel actions using service-oriented architecture.

The project has a number of tasks operating using a parallel implementation mode. One task consists of establishing a hardware and software platform upgrade for the early adopters. The platform is MS Exchange 2007 and is following the best practices for large-scale enterprise systems. The project is in the process of installing the hardware and software.

Other critical tasks include defining current and future services, developing a service level agreement, developing requirements and establishing any required policies and then expanding the service to other campus units. These tasks are required in order to have an enterprise level system capable of delivering service to a large portion of campus at the required high-quality service level. Issues such as help desk support, local support and Tier 2 support training are all being discussed as part of this effort. It is expected that units will be able to start opting in to the new service starting in late Fall of 2007.

The project implementation and planning will be based on a sustainable funding model that is being developed through collaboration. The early adopters have all contributed resources in order to support their portion of the efforts. In all cases, the resources contributed are less than or equal to what they were previously committing for a similar service.

Watch for updates on progress and opportunities to participate in fall.

Marc Hoit