Organization: UTCC Network & Operations Services, Network Development
Phone: +1 416 978 6134
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Newsgroups: bit.listserv.cw-email
Date:         Tue, 29 Dec 1992 15:05:18 -0500
              <CW-EMAIL@TECMTYVM.BITNET>
From:         "Eric M. Carroll" <eric@MADHAUS.UTCS.UTORONTO.CA>
Subject:      UofT Reports on Institutional EMail

The issue of enterprise electronic mail has recently become a hot topic.
UofT has been involved in email for a long time, both departmentally and
centrally. Recently, the Computing & Communications division began
a process to investigate electronic mail with a difference from the general
"departmental" approach. Rather than treat electronic mail as a personal
productivity tool, we took a focus of delivering a "core institutional service"
to the subscriber's desktop. This service was intended to have definable
performance, service and support goals. It was also intended to be delivered
to rather large subscriber base that is composed of individuals that
currently do not participate in email, over a strategic TCP/IP communications
infrastructure. It must interoperate seamlessly with the well-established
Internet email systems currently in use in the departments with established
networking experience. We also intended to utilize the institutional
electronic mail service infrastructure as a platform for future value-added
services.

These issues, plus many others, resulted in the outright elimination of
the majority of commercial and non-commercial packages available in
the market today, due to their LAN-oriented, many-server, many-gateway,
non-TCP/IP approach that inhibited our ability to define and deliver a
reliable, supported institutional electronic mail service within the limits
of our organization's available personnel resources. In order to document
our effort, and provide evaluation criteria for specific vendor products,
we produced a series of reports that illustrate our customer environment,
customer needs, and overall design considerations for the service.  We are
currently producing an implementation plan that we hope to take to pilot,
and then production, stages. This implementation step, with active vendor,
customer and management discussions, is currently in progress.

Our reports to date, of which I am the primary author, are now available
for general distribution. While they are UofT specific, they may offer
valuable information to anyone interested in the challenges of
institutional electronic mail. Right now I have TeX dvi2ps ps files
available that may or may not print depending on the laser printer you have
- they are known to work on PSJet+ and Laserwriters. They are available
for a limited time period via blind anonymous ftp on madhaus.utcs.utoronto.ca:

        /distrib/design.ps.Z
        /distrib/design_title.ps.Z
        /distrib/requirements.ps.Z
        /distrib/requirements_title.ps.Z

These files are not visible to a dir or ls since we do not want them to
appear in an archie listing. madhaus.utcs is not a general ftp archive,
and their appearance here is temporary until I arrange a permanent home.
I will be making up CM font DVI images without the diagrams sometime soon
for people that cannot print these, if there is interest.

Eric Carroll            University of Toronto Computing & Communications
                        Network & Operations Services, Network Development