During the next two years, colleagues throughout University Technology Services (UTS) and other IT departments hope to perform a minor miracle: shrink the number of e-mail systems on the University campus from about 30 to one--the new University E-mail System.

"Having all of these different e-mail systems on campus is not in the University's best interest," said Rita Anderson, project manager for this initiative and director of project management and engineering for UTS.

"We're looking forward to providing a feature-rich e-mail environment in one system that fosters more interdisciplinary collaboration and stays up 24/7," said Anderson. In addition to fostering better communication, a common e-mail system will be more secure, Anderson said.

The new system will have a number of features not currently available for most University faculty and staff, including support for roaming users and automated e-mail groups.

UTS also plans to introduce extended storage for saved e-mail messages that will allow users to exceed current storage limits.

Several departments, including facilities, student affairs, and University Technology Services, are part of a pilot test of the new system. These departments will migrate to the University E-mail System by the end of this year. Beginning early in 2008 and ending in late 2009, all other departments will be migrated to the new system with a priority on those using GroupWise. Training for the new system will be provided by the College of Engineering and Computing.

The University E-mail System supports Web-based access via Outlook Web Access; the system works with a variety of e-mail clients, but most users with Windows workstations will choose to run the Outlook client.

The University E-mail System will run the SonicWall anti-spam appliance to screen incoming e-mails. Any message detected as likely spam is quarantined. Users should periodically check quarantined messages to ensure that messages were mistakenly tagged as spam.

For more information about the University E-mail project, go to www.sc.edu/universityemail. To participate on the advisory team, contact Rita Anderson at ritaa@sc.edu.

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