The Office of Information Technology at Antioch University

This project will automate the creation and deletion of most user accounts at Antioch, it will implement self service capabilities for people to change or retrieve passwords, and it will enable single sign-on for the Portal. The account information will be stored mainly in the directory structures that we have been working on implementing over the past few months as well as in specific applications such as the Portal, Gmail, and Sakai.

• The first phase of the Identity Management project is the account creation (Idm Provisioning) component. Both the Gmail migration and the Portal launch are dependent on completion of this phase. Our target for completion of this phase is the end of June 2009.
• The second phase of the Idm project is for automating the deletion of accounts (Idm Deprovisioning) and setting up self service capabilities for people to change or retrieve passwords. This second phase can proceed after Gmail and the Portal have launched.

Email, calendar, and contact functions will be migrated from FirstClass to Gmail. The details of the migration still have to be finalized but we expect that it will take place over about a two month period starting in early July when phase 1 of the Idm project is completed. We have been in discussion with other Universities that have made the migration and will be following many of the best practices that have been identified by them.

There is still discussion taking place about where to migrate FirstClass Conferences. The Academic Conferences will be moving to Sakai and the active non-academic conferences will likely be replaced by the Group functionality that is available within the Portal, but this decision still has to be finalized. There are many non-active conferences in FirstClass and we are working to identify the owners of these conferences and either have them deleted or archived and then deleted. This process of moving conferences off FirstClass has already started and is expected to continue through to about the end of August. See the attached page for additional information on the migration of FirstClass to Gmail.

We have won a grant from Campus EAI for implementation of their version of the LifeRay portal. The implementation of the portal is starting now with a target for going live with version 1 of the Portal in early July following completion of the first Phase of the Idm project.

At a minimum we expect that version 1 of the Portal will provide single sign-on access to Gmail and Sakai as well as portlets for announcements and access to groups. If time permits there may be other functionality included in version 1. We expect that subsequent versions of the Portal will be rolled out on a regular basis, perhaps at the ends of semesters, and that each subsequent version will contain additional functionality.

We will be forming a Portal advisory committee within the next few weeks to provide advice on:

• The look and feel of the Portal,
• How to roll out the Portal including training and communications, and
• Priorities for functionality to include.

Since the Portal implementation will be an ongoing activity we expect that this committee will also continue on a permanent basis.

In FirstClass all Email messages, conferences, contacts and any other information is stored in a single database called the PostOffice. All accounts and conferences share the same PostOffice and because of this there is no way to restore a single person’s account if something happens to their account. The whole PostOffice has to be restored and then the person’s account has to be extracted from that restored version of the PostOffice.

Over the past few years the size of the FirstClass PostOffice has grown dramatically. This affects our costs for running FirstClass as well as increasing the difficulty and time required for converting FirstClass to any other system. The main causes for the increase in size of the PostOffice are:

• There are many accounts in the system that are inactive but have never been deleted and it is very difficult to identify which accounts can be deleted. This is one of the problems we are hoping to address with the Identity Management System.
• There are many conferences in FirstClass that appear to be inactive but again it is difficult to identify which conferences can be deleted.
• Many individuals do not delete older Emails that are no longer required. Over time their Email accounts get larger and larger which contributes to the overall size of the PostOffice as well as making their individual accounts more difficult to convert.

People’s Email accounts will be converted to Gmail starting in July. The conversion will include a person’s Email history, their calendar entries, and their contact list. Documents will not be converted so if there are documents stored in a FirstClass account (i.e. not Emails) then these documents must be saved outside FirstClass and then deleted from FirstClass before the conversion. We expect the conversion of Email accounts will take place over about a two month period.

Based on previous experience and discussions with consultants, we are not expecting any particular problems with the conversion for people who are below their disk quotas. We are expecting that there may be problems in converting larger accounts – those using more than 500MB of disk storage. For this reason we will schedule conversion of these accounts after the other accounts have been converted and we will continue to encourage people to reduce the amount of disk storage they are using. Note however that the conversion will not be able to handle individual Email attachments that are larger than 20MB and these attachments must be saved outside FirstClass and then deleted from FirstClass before an account is converted.

In thinking about how and where we convert FirstClass conferences we have split the conferences into three basic types:

Academic Conferences related to particular courses. These conferences are typically created automatically at the start of a semester based on the courses that are being offered that semester. These conferences are now being created in Sakai and will no longer be created in FirstClass. There are many old copies of these conferences in FirstClass some going back many years. Depending on their age and whether or not they are still required these historical conferences may be deleted, archived and then deleted, or converted to Sakai. These decisions will be made in consultation with the Academic Leadership.

Alumni Conferences are conferences that have been used to maintain a sense of community with Antioch Alumni. The intent is that this functionality will be migrated to YourMembership. Whether or not there is any way of converting existing conference content to YourMembership will depend on what capabilities exist within YourMembership and how YourMembership is configured for Antioch. This is still to be determined. Note that Alumni will continue to get Antioch Email accounts in Gmail.

Alumni Conferences are conferences that have been used to maintain a sense of community with Antioch Alumni. The intent is that this functionality will be migrated to YourMembership. Whether or not there is any way of converting existing conference content to YourMembership will depend on what capabilities exist within YourMembership and how YourMembership is configured for Antioch. This is still to be determined. Note that Alumni will continue to get Antioch Email accounts in Gmail.

Other Non-Academic Conferences refers to all the other conferences in FirstClass. We anticipate that these conferences will be replaced by the Group functionality available within the Portal which appears to offer much richer functionality than is available in FirstClass Conferences. A Portal Committee is currently being formed and this will be one of the first questions they look at. If the decision is confirmed to move these conferences to the Portal that process is expected to start in July and will take place over about a two month period. To help get rid of conferences that are no longer required, we will only convert those conferences which have an identified owner and we will work with those owners to identify how much history to convert.