The Division of IT will involve faculty and staff representatives this spring in a large project designed to make the best decision possible about faculty and staff email. Three options are available: 1) to stay with Exchange hosted on site or offsite, 2) to move to Google Apps, 3) to move to Office 365 The second and third options are hosted in the cloud.
Three groups will work together to tackle this study. First is the Executive Steering Committee will be appointed and chaired by the CIO. This group will approve the project charter and receive information from the other groups. The second group is a 10 member faculty/staff task force. Faculty representatives are Chris Hoyt (representing Faculty Senate), Geoff Goehle, Betsy Clementson, Lori Schrodt, and Bill Perry. Representing the staff are Alison Joseph (representing Staff Senate), Tammy Hudson, Donna Welch, Patrick Frazier, and David Onder. This group will study options, make comparisons, and make recommendations. The third group is the project team who will engage in the detailed analysis. The taskforce will conduct an Open Forum for faculty and staff on Monday, February 18 from 2:30 to 3:30 in the UC Theatre. The project manager is Al Sanders. Other project team members are Stan Hammer, Joe Savage, Josh Bright, Mark Murphy, Brian Dickens, Jim Moravansky, Brad Semma and Anna McFadden.
The Task Force will add input from the open forum to additional considerations for comparison: cost; infrastructure alignment (how well does the option work with our other systems); security, privacy, and legal requirements; migration efforts; storage; support; and the cost of change. Below is a flowchart of the decision process.