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0 - IMAP in 90 Days or How to Migrate 25,000 Users to IMAP in Three Months Jay Graham Computing Services and Systems Development University of Pittsburgh 419 South Bellefield Avenue Pittsburgh, PA 15217 (412) 624-5244 [email protected] ABSTRACT Pittsburgh campus. Extensive use of user logs, forwarding data and distribution was critical to the process. The final phase The University of Pittsburgh began the Internet Message Access involved the migration of 25,000 users from VMS Mail, Unix Protocol (IMAP) Project in the spring of 1997 as an evaluation Pine and POP mail to the new environment by April 1, 2000. project investigating the replacement options for the legacy e-mail systems and a POP3 service. The project was initially divided into two phases---Phase 1 to deploy an IMAP server for campus- Keywords wide use and Phase 2 to identify and provide a reliable, high quality, enterprise-wide IMAP client. A sub-group of the IMAP IMAP, e-mail, POP, legacy, client-server project team was formed to identify requirements and evaluate clients. Cyrusoft International's Mulberry was found to meet the ever changing requirements of the campus computing labs and 1. INTRODUCTION have sufficient features and functionality that users would be compelled to switch from their legacy clients to the new Electronic mail has become a primary tool used by many large environment. organizations to enhance daily communication. E-mail between managers, workers, customers, students, teachers or parents often A critical third phase was added to the IMAP project which serves as a more efficient, cost effective and convenient form of required a phase-out of the legacy e-mail systems by April 1, 2000 interaction. On the University of Pittsburgh campuses, electronic and the provision of a standard graphical client-server e-mail mail is used in many different ways by students, faculty and staff, system for both the Macintosh and Windows platforms to all and is by far one of the most highly utilized electronically students, faculty and staff. distributed service provided by Computing Services and Systems Development (web browsing is the most frequently launched application on our campus). Many faculty require students to The presentation will describe the third and final phase of the submit reports and assignments attached to e-mail messages rather project in detail, discuss the issues surrounding how legacy e-mail than submitting the materials in the more convention fashion--- users were kept informed, trained and migrated to new IMAP printed on paper. An increasing number of courses require client. The presenters will identify the obstacles as we students to participate in on-line discussions and chat sessions approached the deadline for full conversion to the IMAP protocol using their e-mail accounts. Problem-based and learner-centered and the phase-out of all other e-mail systems on the University of curriculums are placing more emphasis on collaboration and student teams (some virtual), all of which require extensive use of electronic communication. Students use e-mail to stay in touch with each other over the term breaks rather than writing letters and placing long-distance phone calls. Faculty collaborate with colleagues around the globe, using e-mail as a means to transfer images, jointly author documents and articles, compare data and LEAVE THIS TEXT BOX IN PLACE even review video segments. E-mail has become the most AND BLANK ubiquitous form of place and time independent communication ever available to our students, faculty and staff. During the next five years electronic mail service at the University have very low administrative cost. A second goal is to provide of Pittsburgh will be enhanced by standardizing on the IMAP inter-operability with a wide variety of IMAP clients in order that protocol. This process will involve consolidating and the users can communicate with anyone, anywhere, using multimedia elimination any of our legacy mail delivery systems, primarily enabled electronic mail. Supported clients include Pine, Mulberry, VMS, UNIX/Pine and POP. The effort involved in this process is Outlook/Express, Netscape Messenger, and Eudora. All of these enormous and the issues are challenging. The University of clients are provided without cost to users on the University of Pittsburgh IMAP project proposes to build an enterprise-wide Pittsburgh campus with the exception of Eudora Pro v4.x. electronic mail system that is centered on high reliability, extensive availability, and large scalability, using both existing and emerging Internet standards. 3. Project Requirements Computing Services and Systems Development in cooperation The IMAP project has an ever expanding list of requirements as with Network Services assembled a IMAP project team to explore new Internet Standards are adopted and additional functionality is the migration issues, set project goals, identify a timetable and built into the supported IMAP clients. An early version of this list plan the implementation. Team members were selected from was the initial set of requirements provided by the IMAP project portions of both organizations representing systems, network, team in 1995. First, the IMAP service must adhere to a many-to- account management, support services, Help Desk and training one client-server architecture. The importance of the client server staff. Emphasis was placed on standards compliance, overcoming model to the overall information architecture at the University of technical barriers, training for the end-user community and Pittsburgh was established by the Information Architecture and meeting the implementation deadline. Process Innovation Project Report in 1994. The client-server model has proven to be reliable and highly successful in the past as indicated by the University of Pittsburgh's POP mail service The technologies initially recommended by the IMAP project prototype project. Second, the service had to be based on all team are Internet Message Access Protocol Version 4, Simple current or de facto standards. This includes Network protocols Mail Transport Protocol, RFC 822, Kerberos, Cyrus IMAP server such as TCP/IP and other Open Internet Messaging protocols from Carnegie Mellon University, and Multipurpose Internet Mail such as SMTP and ESMTP for mail transport and Message header Extensions. The University of Pittsburgh is currently Format (RFC822). Third, the service must be scalable to incorporating a Centralized Directory Service based on the potentially serve all 50,000-60,000 users at the University of Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, as well as using both Pittsburgh. It is certain that the IMAP service will grow Digital Certificates and Pretty Good Privacy for privacy enhanced continually during the next two years as the legacy mail systems messaging into it’s overall electronic messaging strategy. are eventually phased out of service. Additions and upgrades to the IMAP service cannot consume excessive resources and must be both seamless and transparent to the end-user community. The IMAP project team is carefully tracking the IMAP standards. Fourth, the IMAP service must be accessible from all of the The team will adjust its planning to implement some of the supported client platforms which include, Intel, Macintosh, Unix, emerging Internet standards as they become available and/or and VMS. Fifth, the service must employ and adhere to the mature. Those standards include, but are not limited to, the current Network Authorization Account model and also support Internet Calendaring standard and other extensions to the IMAP the future Single Sign-on account model. Currently, this support protocol such as voice and the sieve filtering and workflow is provided by Kerberos v4 which also handles authentication standard. above and beyond plain-text authentication. Sixth, the introduction of this service must not give users yet another The system will be centrally managed and will scale from student, mailbox without their knowledge. One of the goals of the IMAP faculty and staff end-users to wide-scale departmental use. project is to reduce and simplify the University of Pittsburgh's Migration paths and tools will be provided for conversion from electronic mail environment by eliminating redundant electronic the legacy mail stores to the new IMAP client environment. mail services. Currently, three existing central mail services University departments that currently operate decentralized mail (Unix, VMS, and POP) are built automatically when a user's servers will be able to inter-operate between the centralized IMAP Network Authorization Account is created. The majority of end- server(s) and their preexisting IMAP compliant mail systems and users on our campuses access only one electronic mail service. clients. Extensive documentation will be provided on-line as well Unless an end-user "forwards" all other accounts to a single as instructor-led training on the configuration and use of the new account, electronic mail will accumulate on the other mail systems client in the IMAP environment. This training will initially focus without their knowledge. A requirement of the IMAP project on student users. team is to eliminate the need for users to "forward" their mail from various systems by creating a single IMAP mail store. Seventh, the IMAP server implementation must support the use of account quotas. A reasonable quota policy must be established 2. Project Goal and enforced, and should not interfere with any legitimate instructional or research activity on the IMAP service. Examples The principal goal of the IMAP project is to provide a broadly of those activities include, the ability of students to submit course available, robust, scalable, enterprise-wide electronic mail service assignments, materials or projects electronically, faculty to to the University community. The service must be easy to use and exchange scholarly data and documents with colleagues, and intellectual collaboration between students and faculty. The mail 6. Final Stage of the Project - Migrating delivery agent must support and enforce the quota in the expected fashion and possibly alert the user that he/she is approaching 25,000 Users to IMAP his/her quota.