I spend most of my time dealing with e-mail issues. But, we outsourced our e-mail system about 3 years ago.
Yes, I spend more time doing e-mail system stuff than I did before we outsourced it. We've also spent millions of dollars on the outsourcing of e-mail. The year before the decision to outsource it, the director level types were bragging that they only put $30,000 into e-mail. Don't know how much we had asked to upgrade e-mail a couple years earlier, but pretty sure we didn't know millions could be asked for. I think we did pry a little more than $30,000 out of them while we were keeping it running to the migration. Though we weren't supposed to make any significant changes or improvements to it (though at one point, they wanted us to take functionality out of it....because the provider wasn't intending to provide those features.) Meanwhile, one of the leaders of the campus system administrator group took a poke at central IT last week....about whether they're just paying us central sysadmins to keep the lights on, because the IT leadership keeps outsourcing everything. The CIO is on a mission to consolidate IT (there's talk at the state level that all the universities should consolidate their IT, not just within a university.) Though my manager has said repeatedly that you can't just take a department sysadmin and drop them into our group and make them central. After all, some of them used to work for central IT before they had to go into positions elsewhere on campus. On the upside....because we've outsourced e-mail. When it goes down, we can still do things like eat lunch. And, I don't have to deal with compromised accounts from hotel wifi when I'm at a conference, in training or on vacation. Our contract for outsourcing comes up for renewal in about 9 months. And, the CIO is talking about moving our mail somewhere else...except that estimates are that it'll take a year to make that kind of decision. The former associate VPIT used to say the threat of moving mail elsewhere was an attempt to get the provider to come down on price (and not just continue to not pay for other features we've been using, etc.) Except that now word is out, and people want us to switch now....though they don't really know what they want.... Just that it has to be faster, better, more features and be just like it was before we outsourced. (they want everything and nothing?) I think I used to do other stuff too.... and maybe I'll get to do some of that again before the end of the year. But, our service provider upgraded from Zimbra 6.0.10 to Zimbra 7.1.3 during Thanksgiving....and all sorts of new and old issues have come piling in. Meanwhile..there are some people that have come out and said that e-mail should've been considered part of our core business. Though I don't know if I'd want to have e-mail come back to us. Though officially, our e-mail administrator position has been vacant before I started here...since Google lured him away. Wonder if we would get real people to take care of e-mail if it did come back. Though not sure how much different we'd go... we'd probably run parts of Zimbra if we had to take it back.... The mailstore/web/client access could stay zimbra like. Its like how we wanted to redo e-mail if given the chance. Though we'd keep our separate MX, MTA, AV, SPAM layers. Though we first went with current provider, they had like 2 ldap servers, 2 proxy servers, 4 MTAs and 4 mailstores.....but somewhere the the 4 MTAs and 4 mailstores, became 7 mailstores/MTAs. Think there are 3 ldap servers now (one dedicated for the ironport that's in front of things now.) Nothing like answering, why was webmail not available during the test of the RAVE system? (and why wasn't it a problem before?) Though there's that strange feeling when the service provider is explaining that part of the performance problems we've been having is because of hacks we had done in the old system to make it work the way we wanted and that they had upgraded that system to the new version, rather than doing a clean install. And, the CIO wanting to know why we didn't do a clean install. Umm, it would wipe out all the existing data? Personally, I'd be fine...if I had to move all my mail out and then back after an upgrade. But, I'm not going to do it for anybody else (or worry about the share, invitee, etc. relationship stuff.) I'd like to reorganize how some of my e-mail is organized, and I haven't had time to clean up my inbox in a while. -- Who: Lawrence K. Chen, P.Eng. - W0LKC - Senior Unix Systems Administrator For: Enterprise Server Technologies (EST) -- & SafeZone Ally Snail: Computing and Telecommunications Services (CTS) Kansas State University, 109 East Stadium, Manhattan, KS 66506-3102 Phone: (785) 532-4916 - Fax: (785) 532-3515 - Email: [email protected] Web: http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~lkchen - Where: 11 Hale Library
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