Hello everyone - sorry to cross-post, but this proposal concerns all
Opencast mailing lists.
The Opencast board and Matterhorn committers have been piloting the use
of the service Google Groups for Business under a Google Apps Opencast
instance. Finding the service to work very well - with the exception of
1 known issue (see below) - we would like to proceed and migrate all of
Opencast's mailing lists to this new service beginning in December.
The benefits gained from moving to Google Apps for our mailing lists are:
- No organization needs to maintain a mailing list server, or contribute
a systems administrator to maintain it (this has been an issue)
- Better list management tools and features, improved spam control
(makes Michelle happy)
- Ability for users to create and subscribe to a single thread, as
opposed to having to join a list in order to ask a question (the
requirement to subscribe to a list in order to ask a support question is
a barrier for some)
- Ability for users to respond to old posts (people try to do this
frequently through Nabble, but it doesn't usually work)
- Integrated mailing list and archive (the Nabble archive confuses
several people each week)
Known Issue: If your email address is managed under a different instance
of Google Apps, you may not be able to subscribe to an Opencast mailing
list with that email address. For example, @berkeley.edu email is now
managed through Google Apps, and I cannot subscribe
[email protected] to an Opencast mailing list on Google. I believe
this is because Berkeley has not enabled Google Groups in their Google
instance (I can subscribe with a different Google-managed email address
in which Groups has been enabled), so not all Google-managed email
addresses may experience this problem. The workaround is to subscribe
under a different email address or ask your Google Apps administrators
to enable Groups.
The other big change you should be aware of is that the domain name for
the mailing lists will change. We have been slowly moving away from our
original opencastproject.org domain toward the more recently acquired
opencast.org, since Opencast is more than a single project. So
[email protected] will become [email protected]. Less
typing is a good thing, but will take some time before we all get our
autocompletes updated.
The migration effort will involve setting up the mailing lists and
adding all current mailing list subscribers to the Google groups. The
old mailing lists will remain active for some time during the
transition, but will include a reminder to discontinue using the old
lists. We could possibly also set up old posts to forward to the new
list automatically. Any suggestions for a smoother transition are
appreciated. At some point, we also need to consider what to do about
the old Nabble archives. We will start building a new archive in our
Google instance, so Nabble will soon become irrelevant, redundant and
confusing to keep around - a discussion for another day though I think.
If you have any concerns or comments about the migration to Google
Apps/Google Groups, please let us know ASAP. I hope to initiate the
migration effort during the month of December, as long as there are no
concerns raised by the community.
Thanks!
Michelle
--
Michelle Ziegmann PMP
Technical Project Manager
Educational Technology Services
University of California Berkeley
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