cleId=9117322
Always an issue with ASPs but not being able to do anything about the outage
for systems I am responsible for would drive me nuts!
Jonathan
................................
Jonathan Mergy (jmergy@lwhs.org)
Director Of Technology
Lick-Wilmerding High School
755 Ocean Ave, SF CA 94112
P:415.333.4021 x365
http://www.lwhs.org
> From: Tom Phelan <tphelan@PEDDIE.ORG>
> Reply-To: ISED-L <ISED-L@listserv.syr.edu>
> Date: Tue, 14 Oct 2008 10:18:01 -0400
> To: ISED-L <ISED-L@listserv.syr.edu>
> Subject: Re: Switching Email Systems
>
> On Mon, 13 Oct 2008 16:42:18 -0700, Steve Taffee
> <sustainability@CASTILLEJA.ORG> wrote:
>
>> We are considering switching email systems. From what to what is not as
>> important to me at this point as hearing from you as to what lengths
>> you have gone to in migrating user data.
>
> We switched to Google Apps this September a week before school started. This
> is the first email format switch for us and thus some users had data dating
> back to the mid 1990's!
>
> In a nutshell, here was our plan re legacy data:
>
> * We migrated nothing besides address book entries on an as-requested basis.
> * We will leave our previous email server online for 1 year providing easy
> access in a familiar format to old email via either the old client or
> web-based access. However, after the mandatory migration day all inbound and
> outbound email from the old system was disabled.
> * We will provide faculty and staff with a CD which contains the old client
> software and their mail file along with easy instructions for installing the
> client in a standalone capacity to access their email. We also archived
> these files to tape in case faculty loose their CD.
>
> After experimenting with various migration options, in the end we decided
> that the best way to provide access for legacy emails was in the same format
> users were used to. We saw a lot of down sides to migrating old emails and
> not a lot of up side. Users know where their stuff is in the old system and
> how to find it best when it is still in the old system. Many also found it
> reassuring to know that the old system would still be available for an
> entire year essentially untouched so they didn't have to worry about whether
> they would be able to find their old emails. Furthermore, it is our
> experience that users need access to their old emails far less than they
> think, especially for email over 1 year old. Thus having to go into the old
> system with an occasional cut and paste is not too cumbersome and we
> anticipate that the CD we provide will rarely be used.
>
> Six weeks into the new system and we have had almost no negative feedback
> regarding access to old emails. The biggest area of negative feedback was
> getting used to a new system and different ways of doing familiar things.
> Thus our experience has been that email migration was not the issue needing
> the most attention, rather helping users to get comfortable using a new
> system that they all use on a daily basis was most important.
>
> Toward this end we provided a 3 month optional migration period for all
> faculty and staff to build up a good core of users already comfortable with
> the new system before the forced migration day. We also migrated all offices
> on an office-by-office basis over the summer so we could give offices
> focused attention before faculty returned and they could be comfortable with
> the new system before the busy start of the new academic year hit. These two
> approaches both significantly helped reduce the support load on the tech
> department and reduced anxiety over the switch. By the time of the mandatory
> migration more than 1/2 of non-students were already migrated.
>
> On the student side we decided to migrate all students at the same time as
> we felt we could not handle assorted questions/problems from hundreds of
> users migrating at different times. By migrating all students at the same
> time they relied more on helping each other than on the tech department.
>
> --
> Tom Phelan
> Director of Technology
> Peddie School
>
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