@hawaii.edu Services Keep Getting Better by Michael Hodges As of February 18, 2002, the University system is now running on completely new hardware and software for email services. A migration effort of great magnitude culminated over the President's day weekend with the transition to Sun's iPlanet suite of products running on an industrial strength server and storage device. This combination of new hardware plus software results in perceptibly faster response times, improved reliability, and room for continued growth. This was a relatively complex project, given the broad range of emailing habits and creative practices across our University community. All major functionality of the old environment has its equivalent in the new environment. Included in the upgrade is a greatly improved Web Mail client. Pine users averse to the newly required double-login should consider Web Mail as an alternative. To use Web Mail, point your Web browser to http://mail.hawaii.edu. Besides improved functionality, Web Mail also offers better security. All data moving between the UH mail server and the browser is encrypted. Completion of this project has also laid the foundations for additional services. The Email Implementation Project is part of an ongoing effort to create a compelling email solution that will be attractive to all colleges, departments, and offices. ITS will continue to improve existing and establish new @hawaii.edu services. Our @hawaii.edu services currently include antivirus scanning--all email passing through the ITS servers are scanned to prevent the unwanted spread of computer viruses and to reduce the amount of time spent rebuilding crippled systems. The next @hawaii.edu service to be made available is anti-spam filtering. Anti-spam filtering reduces the "junk mail" that plagues our inboxes. We look towards a steady rollout of new functionality and new services. These services will include an enterprise-wide WebCalendar tool, address lookups from a University-wide directory using LDAP, firstname.lastname email addressing, and preferred email address support. For more information, visit our Email Implementation Project Web site. This is just the first phase of ITS' renewed efforts to define, articulate, and expand @hawaii.edu services for the entire UH community. Here are some graphs showing recent email statistics. Graph 1: Pieces Sent Illustrates approximately 25% growth in the number of email messages sent over the last 18 months. Graph 2: Quantity of Data Sent Illustrates approximately 40% growth in volume of information sent via email over the last 15 months.

Information Technology Services Maintained by: editor@hawaii.edu		©2001 University of Hawaii Updated: April 11, 2002