paper -
65 IMAP in 90 Days
Jay
Graham, University of Pittsburgh
Brian Hart, University of Pittsburgh
The University of Pittsburgh began the Internet
Message Access Protocol (IMAP) Project in the spring of 1997 as an evaluation
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-wide use and Phase 2 to identify and provide a reliable, high quality,
enterprise-wide IMAP client. A
sub-group of the IMAP 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 have sufficient features and functionality that
users would be compelled to switch from their legacy clients to the new
environment.
A critical third phase was added to the IMAP project
which required a phase-out of the legacy e-mail systems by April 1, 2000 and
the provision of a standard graphical client-server e-mail system for both the
Macintosh and Windows platforms to all students, faculty and staff.
The presentation will describe the third and final phase of the project in detail, discuss the issues surrounding how legacy e-mail users were kept informed, trained and migrated to new IMAP client. The presenters will identify the obstacles as we approached the deadline for full conversion to the IMAP protocol and the phase-out of all other e-mail systems on the University of Pittsburgh campus. Extensive use of user logs, forwarding data and distribution was critical to the process. The final phase involved the migration of 20,000 users from VMS Mail, Unix Pine and POP mail to the new environment on April 1, 2000.
Keywords: IMAP, e-mail, Mulberry, POP, VMS Mail, Pine and enterprise-wide