Integrated E-Mail/Calendaring @ BMC

To: shilton

From: Mark Colvson

Subject: Coming Soon: Bryn Mawr College's New Integrated E-Mail/Calendaring
System

Information Services recently completed an intensive review of our current
E-Mail and Calendaring (i.e. Meeting Maker) services, partly in response to
community requests. In late December we received the approval and support of the
senior administration and Board of Trustees of the College to begin a major
upgrade to these systems.

We are now developing an implementation plan to migrate the community from
our current wide range of email and calendar programs to a single integrated
email and calendaring service, with full-featured web-based email/calendar,
campus address book accessible from anywhere, to-do lists, and collaborative
workspaces. The new system will have a powerful server “back end” with much more mail storage space than the current system and continued security and privacy for the College’s data. Deployment will begin for most of us in late spring.
At that time our email and Meeting Maker calendar information, including stored
older data, will begin to migrate into the new system.

For more information about the decision-making process and details about the
software selected, we invite you to read the Proposal submitted to the
President’s Cabinet. We will host a demonstration session at Coffee Hour on
March 21. Feel free to bring your questions then, or email them to either of us.
We will also discuss the new system at the Administrative Office Heads meeting
on February 20, and the Faculty Meeting on March 5. We will post this
announcement and responses to the most frequently asked questions to http://is.blogs.brynmawr.edu/.

Heartfelt thanks to all of you in the community who helped us evaluate and
test the candidate systems. We were gratified to find a strong community-wide
consensus in favor of a system which provided support for both Macintosh and PC
users, while providing sustainability and strong privacy protections for our
email and calendar communications.

Sincerely,
Mark Colvson, Education and Outreach Project Mgr
Janet Scannell, Director of Computing Services

Ohhh! This sounds like fun! Is BMC going to give me something to rival my gmail/gcal pair? We'll see!