Notes from November 4, 2004 ITPAC Meeting:

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notes by Steve Lasley


Streaming Audio from the meeting.

Steve Lasley presented the ICC committee's Recommendation for a UF-level solution to correct "DisplayName" field problems affecting Exchange Global Address Book functionality for ITPAC's approval. After discussion, ITPAC voted unanimously to approve the recommendation.

Steve Lasley presented the ICC recommendation on Acquiring a Microsoft Support Contract for IFAS ITAS yearly. Chris Hughes detailed the various levels of support and their costs and a motion was made for ITPAC support. The motion died for lack of a second.

Steve Lasley presented the ICC recommendation on A new IFAS e-mail address naming convention. There was consideration discussion detailing the pros and cons of the proposal. It was stressed that the procedural details must be very carefully devised to minimize the problems seen by our end users. An extensive educational process must be planned and implemented to prepare our end users for this change. IT needs to consider methods for informing the senders of incoming messages that are subsequently bounced of a means for locating the new correct email address for a particular contact. It should also be stressed that this is the "final and for all time" e-mail address change--at least as far as IFAS is concerned.

The ITPAC supported moving IFAS e-mail addresses to the "gatorlink@ifas.ufl.edu" format. The procedural aspects of the proposal, however, were tabled for continued development by the ICC. This item will be reconsidered at the next ITPAC meeting.

Steve Lasley presented the ICC recommendation on Changing IFAS IT e-mail client support. The recommendation was approved with the caveat that the new version of Outlook first be made available to everyone and users be informed that support for other clients will be dropped. Users should be given a three month period from notice to implementation. With these addenda, ITPAC voted unanimously to approve the recommendation.

Dan Cromer gave an update on the status of the new anti-spam system, Internet Message Filtering (IMF). All e-mail will be delivered, but e-mails scored 5 and higher by our new system will go to a person's "Junk e-mail" folder, with the remainder going to the user's Inbox. Using either webmail or Outlook 2003, a person can mark items placed in the "Junk e-mail" folder as being from a trusted source and thereby have them whitelisted for future delivery.

Dan Cromer also mentioned that he wants to continue investigating methods that would allow users to send links to files rather than attaching the files themselves to e-mails. E-mail attachments compose a major portion (by size) of our e-mail traffic and alternatives would lead to many efficiencies. This could also solve the problem of how to deliver large documents to people outside our organization--a continual problem for our users. One very promising solution to this would be via use of Sharepoint as detailed at the last ITPAC meeting.

Dan Cromer notified ITPAC of the intention to change our distribution list naming convention. Such names currently begin with an underscore; that will be changed so they begin with a period. This is to conform to a convention proposed at the UF level. Dwight Jesseman will also be changing the naming convention for contacts (aka forwarding addresses) to include the suffix "-IFAS". This is being done to distinguish our contacts from those throughout UF.

The question was raised whether or not VPN would continue to be supported. Dan Cromer reported that we will continue to provide that until the UF VPN does everything we need it to do. Dwight Jesseman also noted that with the new Outlook 2003 client, a VPN is not needed, provided the client is configured to user RPC over HTTP. Instructions for this configuration are available on the ITNS website e-mail help page via the RPC/HTTP Settings Client Requirements link.

The next ITPAC meeting is planned for February 2005.