Brandon Muramatsu

Observations on email systems and universities…

Not something you want to see your alma mater /. over…Email Offline At the Home of Sendmail. There’s the usual stupidity of people not reading the original post in the comments. There are a couple good knowledgeable comments at the end of the story.

Some of the takeaways from the video of Cal’s CIO that I find interesting:

  • Universities have to stop building systems for 35 years, and buildings for 100 years. Be nimble, change models to match the time. University design paradigm has been to build for eternity, no longer a viable method in IT. It may mean more failures, hopefully they’ll be smaller failures and fixed faster.
  • The folks that built the systems 35 years ago are not around anymore, or even 10 years ago. Legacy systems are very customized. Can’t get talent to fix/maintain them. That’s probably not going to change going forward, even if the same person is at the university, they’ve moved on a few (or a lot) of times in terms of technology and skills.
  • Everyone fills in with their own initiative. Communication is key if you’re changing systems, culture, process.
  • With respect to email replacement: Microsoft 365 gets you 80%, Google gets you 80%, it’s a different 20%. Administrators and staff like Microsoft–they know how to use it. Students like Google, it’s interface and cost. Mismatch. Who do you serve best?
  • Thanksgiving/December is an interesting spike in use. The holiday, end of term, application deadlines. Big spikes in mail delivery, and mail access.
  • Email systems were (probably) designed for people as proxies for connections. Today, everyone has lots more devices. Coming back from a holiday, how many devices per person are hitting the servers at the same time – 2, 3, 4, more? Laptop, desktop, iPhone, iPad, other laptop, and so on…
BobJacobsen writes
“The UC Berkeley email system has been either offline, or only providing limited access, for more than a week. How can the place where sendmail originated fall so far? The campus CIO gave an internal seminar (video, slides) where he discussed the incident, the response, and some of the history. Briefly, the growth of email clients was going to overwhelm the system eventually, but the crisis was advanced when a disk failure required a restart after some time offline. Not discussed is the long series of failures to identify and implement the replacement system (1, 2, 3, 4). Like the New York City Dept. of Education problem discussed yesterday, this is a failure of planning and management being discussed as a problem with (inflexible) technology. How can IT people solve things like this?”
Source: Jacobsen, Bob. (2011, December 4). Email Offline At the Home of Sendmail. Retrieved from Slashdot Web Site on December 5, 2011: http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/12/04/1949241/email-offline-at-the-home-of-sendmail
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