home *** CD-ROM | disk | FTP | other *** search
- Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU
- Path: sparky!uunet!paladin.american.edu!auvm!MADHAUS.UTCS.UTORONTO.CA!ERIC
- Organization: UTCC Network & Operations Services, Network Development
- Phone: +1 416 978 6134
- Mime-Version: 1.0
- Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
- Message-ID: <9212292005.AA11601@madhaus.utcs.utoronto.ca>
- Newsgroups: bit.listserv.cw-email
- Date: Tue, 29 Dec 1992 15:05:18 -0500
- Sender: Campus-Wide Electronic Mail Systems discussion list
- <CW-EMAIL@TECMTYVM.BITNET>
- From: "Eric M. Carroll" <eric@MADHAUS.UTCS.UTORONTO.CA>
- Subject: UofT Reports on Institutional EMail
- Lines: 50
-
- The issue of enterprise electronic mail has recently become a hot topic.
- UofT has been involved in email for a long time, both departmentally and
- centrally. Recently, the Computing & Communications division began
- a process to investigate electronic mail with a difference from the general
- "departmental" approach. Rather than treat electronic mail as a personal
- productivity tool, we took a focus of delivering a "core institutional service"
- to the subscriber's desktop. This service was intended to have definable
- performance, service and support goals. It was also intended to be delivered
- to rather large subscriber base that is composed of individuals that
- currently do not participate in email, over a strategic TCP/IP communications
- infrastructure. It must interoperate seamlessly with the well-established
- Internet email systems currently in use in the departments with established
- networking experience. We also intended to utilize the institutional
- electronic mail service infrastructure as a platform for future value-added
- services.
-
- These issues, plus many others, resulted in the outright elimination of
- the majority of commercial and non-commercial packages available in
- the market today, due to their LAN-oriented, many-server, many-gateway,
- non-TCP/IP approach that inhibited our ability to define and deliver a
- reliable, supported institutional electronic mail service within the limits
- of our organization's available personnel resources. In order to document
- our effort, and provide evaluation criteria for specific vendor products,
- we produced a series of reports that illustrate our customer environment,
- customer needs, and overall design considerations for the service. We are
- currently producing an implementation plan that we hope to take to pilot,
- and then production, stages. This implementation step, with active vendor,
- customer and management discussions, is currently in progress.
-
- Our reports to date, of which I am the primary author, are now available
- for general distribution. While they are UofT specific, they may offer
- valuable information to anyone interested in the challenges of
- institutional electronic mail. Right now I have TeX dvi2ps ps files
- available that may or may not print depending on the laser printer you have
- - they are known to work on PSJet+ and Laserwriters. They are available
- for a limited time period via blind anonymous ftp on madhaus.utcs.utoronto.ca:
-
- /distrib/design.ps.Z
- /distrib/design_title.ps.Z
- /distrib/requirements.ps.Z
- /distrib/requirements_title.ps.Z
-
- These files are not visible to a dir or ls since we do not want them to
- appear in an archie listing. madhaus.utcs is not a general ftp archive,
- and their appearance here is temporary until I arrange a permanent home.
- I will be making up CM font DVI images without the diagrams sometime soon
- for people that cannot print these, if there is interest.
-
- Eric Carroll University of Toronto Computing & Communications
- Network & Operations Services, Network Development
-