Re: [SAGE] Pointers for developing needs assessment for enterprise messaging?

[Todd Olson <tco2@cornell.edu>]

Hi

I'm not sure this is relevant, but ...

At Cornell University we are doing our shared calendaring with Corporate Time
   http://www.steltor.com/
Server system requirements are at
   http://www.steltor.com/products/index.cfm?fuseaction=product&GrID=cts
The FAQs at the website suggest there is even a way for outlook to be a
client of this service.

We have implemented it on solaris boxes, clients on windows, macs, unix,
and via web.  It seems to scale, in a distributed manner pretty well.
We currently have close to 5000 people on one node, with other major
segments of the university running on other nodes that inter-communicate.
After a year of studing available products, and now 1.5 years of operation
it seems as though this product does the job.  As A user I have not
complaints.  I'm not on the person operating it so I don't know what
the war stories were/are, but from what I have heard it has not been too bad.

We do our e-mail via sendmail (on solaris)  (35,000 mailboxes ???)
with Eudora as the prefered client.

We've just move the campus directory from an QI/PH implementation
to an LDAP implementation (on Solaris).  This can be queried from
with in Eudora, and directly on a web page.  We are looking at accessing
it from Corporate Time as well.

It seems to meet our needs for shared calendaring, address books,
and e-mail.

I have no idea how this compares to an Exchange environment.

The flexibility of have the various parts separate but interoperate
is very nice.  We can upgrade one part with disturbing the other parts.

Regards,
Todd Olson
Cornell University



>At 02:37 PM 1/4/2002 -0500, Matthew Barr wrote:
>>At the LISA conference,  I heard mention of a way that allowed a Unix system
>>to emulate the major features of an Exchange server, such as calendaring, as
>>well as the obvious email component.  Does anyone have any more detailed
>>information about this?
>
>I think the major resistance most people have to moving away from Exchange is the shared folders and calendar feature.