Revamping Student Email System at University of Penn: A Case Study

1. Penn Live: A Case Study in Updating the Student Email System Ira Winston John MacDermott Chris Mustazza University of Pennsylvania

2. The Decision to Outsource&The Selection Process

3. School of Arts & Sciences (SAS) • Penn (est. 1740) is an Ivy League university in Philadelphia ranked #5 by US News and World Reports • SAS is the largest of the four undergraduate schools at Penn • 500 standing faculty in 26 academic departments • 6500 undergraduates in 52 majors

4. The Decision to Outsource • Spring 2007 email environment • IMAP/POP/Webmail (IMP) • 75mb quotas • 5 year old Sun hardware – end of life-cycle • heavy webmail usage • 30% of students forwarding email to ISP’s

5. The Decision to Outsource • Prevalence of good free services • Outsourcing email and other communications functions is an acknowledgement that the outsourced providers have a better product than most universities offer.

6. The Decision to Outsource • Many students already forwarding • Given that most incoming students (90% in our case) are already using Gmail, Windows Live/Hotmail/MSN, Yahoo or AOL they are quite comfortable with these systems and anything we provide would have to better

7. The Decision to Outsource • Freeing Resources • The resources freed up can be used to provide services that can uniquely be provided by universities.

8. The Decision to Outsource • The student perspective • Students’ main interest is having a .EDU email address, which can be provided without providing an actual account. • .EDU nameplate valued because: • School address may look more official when writing to potential employers • Social networking sites use students’ email domain to determine which university a student attends – Facebook

9. The Selection Process • Consultation with students • Coordination with Wharton and other schools at Penn • Legal issues

10. Implementation

11. Mail Flow • Once the decision was made to outsource email, the first significant implementation detail was how to manage mail flow: • Creating a new mail domain with the MX record pointing to your provider’s servers • or - • Bifurcating your existing domain* *our choice

12. Creating a new domain

13. Creating a new domain - considerations • Pros - • Little to no maintenance work (admin time) • No hardware requirement • Cons - • Unless all students use your new provider, you will have students withdissimilar domains • Not scalable - if you decide to partner with multiple providers later, you would have to bifurcate this new domain or create yet another one

14. Bifurcating a domain

15. Bifurcating a domain - considerations • Pros - • All students receive mail at the same domain • Mail relays can be dual-purpose: relaying mail to your provider and also managing forwarding to any other address a student chooses to use • Cons - • Need mail admin staff to create and maintain routing rules • Need redundant mail relays • Complicates whitelisting and SPAM filtering

16. Penn Live Account Creation • Creating a Penn Live account is really a 2-step process: • Provisioning the account on Microsoft’s servers • Setting up a forwarder so that students’ school mail is forwarded to the Hotmail servers

17. Penn Live Account Creation • Step 1 – User logs into a custom web front-end to create an account • Front-end interfaces with an MIIS server, server used for creating Windows Live accounts

18. Penn Live Account Creation • Step 2 – we set the student’s mail to forward to the Hotmail servers

19. Choices for Managing Mail • Students have several choices for managing their SAS email: • Using Penn Live • Forwarding to an account of their choosing • Students with existing legacy accounts may continue to use them

20. Forwarding to a non-Penn Live Account • We give our students the ability to forward to any account of their choosing, using the same technology we use to forward to Penn Live • Students can log into a custom web interface that allows them to change the location where their school mail is delivered at any time

21. Support & Findings

22. Documentation • Re-organized help documents • Explain choices • Extensive FAQ • Client configurations • Mail Migration Techniques • Other decision support information

24. Documentation • Penn Live Blog • Informal tone • Announcements • Bugs and workarounds • Others ephemeral issues • Provides a forum for comments

25. Support Services • Created new position, “Project Manager for Student Technology” • Revised support model for email services • Reorganized Help Desk with new focus on support for students • Extended hours of coverage

26. Support Services • Help issues • Relatively few questions about features • Lots of questions about forwarding • Client and mobile device configuration • Turned up some bugs, several related to Mac users

27. Support Services • Targeted communications for specific populations • Gmail users • Hotmail users

28. Support Services • Penn Live user survey • Identified areas of common concern (IMAP, SPAM filtering) • Learned more about usage patterns • Platform and browser preferences • Clients and mobile devices • Identified & addressed lots of individual issues

29. How well does Penn Live meet your needs? n=287

30. Mail Delivery Choices:College Undergraduates (6500 students)

31. Mail Delivery Choices:College Undergraduates

32. Findings • Choice is good but… • Choice can lead to confusion “How do I forward Penn Live to my GMail account?”

33. Findings • Hazards of forwarding to other ISPs • Setting the “from” address • SPAM filtering • IMAP matters

34. Findings • A non-story at Penn

36. Next Steps • Roll-out to ~2400 graduate students • Continued analysis of usage data & help requests • Continued refinement of help docs • Calendar services • Collaboration tools

37. Next Steps • The end of mail.sas • Moving resources to other priorities • Investing more in wireless networking • Information security • Media systems

38. Ira Winstonira@sas.upenn.edu Chris Mustazza mustazza@sas.upenn.edu John MacDermottmacderm@sas.upenn.edu