News

E-mail survey first step in collaborative IT overhaul

In print | April 10, 2008

ITS has released preliminary results from a survey that was recently distributed to evaluate the use of e-mail and associated tools on campus. The E-mail, Calendaring and Collaboration Tools Project was initiated by ITS last fall in an effort to update and synchronize the diverse array of programs and platforms utilized by the Swarthmore community.

The short survey, distributed to students, faculty and staff, asked respondents to indicate their level of satisfaction with different programs and web services and the frequency with which they use the following tools: Eudora, Thunderbird, Apple Mail, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft Entourage, Swatmail, Gmail and Mobile devices. Respondents were also asked to indicate how highly they value functions such as calendaring, scheduling, sending or publishing large files, collaboratively editing documents and maintaining e-mail mailing lists.

Associate Chief Information Technology Officer Eric Behrens, who is supervising the project, said that the response rate for the survey is approaching 30 percent. At the time of publication, over 550 people had responded to the survey, which was emailed to 1,920 faculty, staff and students on March 26.

Data gleaned from the survey results will eventually help ITS identify prospective webmail and calendaring programs that would be a good match for the college’s needs. Behrens emphasized that ITS is nowhere near ready to produce a recommendation based on the findings thus far. “We’re going to get to the point next semester where we’re ready to talk about specific products, but that’s not really a concern in the first phase of this project,” he said.

Behrens said that ITS wants to spend sufficient time evaluating the community’s needs and preferences, in order to identify the program or package of programs that best meets these criteria. “Right now, we want to make sure that we get the requirements down and figure out what we need the software to accomplish, before we get hunkered down in to the details of what the software will cost and how we will introduce it,” he said.

The college currently relies on a standard Postfix e-mail server with SquirrelMail for webmail. SwatMail lacks much of the functionality that is built into full-featured mail clients, and the survey results reveal that many users prefer to reroute their e-mail through alternate programs. “Gmail is the de facto standard e-mail tool for students,” Behrens said.

One of the challenges illustrated by the survey data is the reliance of many faculty (36 percent) and most staff (67 percent) on Eudora as their primary tool for accessing e-mail, despite the fact that this program is becoming obsolete. “Eudora is a defunct product,” Behrens said. “It’s not being developed anymore and it hasn’t been for awhile. We really need to move people off there,” Behrens said, acknowledging that transferring users is a multidimensional endeavor. By the end of the month, ITS plans to recommend new mail client software that will replace Eudora for faculty and staff. “Migration forward isn’t just about teaching people to click a few buttons on a new piece of software. It’s about making sure that everything moves forward from one environment to another,” he said.

E-mail tools have special significance for professors, many of whom view e-mail “as an extension of their memory,” Behrens said. “It’s a database of their work history, a record of their past collaborations and research projects, and they use it as a searchable database for their work life.”

In the current phase of the project, ITS will prioritize “the short-term need to move faculty and staff out of Eudora into other software,” Behrens said. Beginning next fall, the project will enter its second phase, in which ITS will explore the possibility of introducing alternative programs in the areas of webmail, calendaring and document sharing. “We will be working collaboratively with the community to evaluate and select long-term solutions, but that process will probably wait until everyone returns in the fall,” Behrens said.

ITS has identified a group of potentially viable programs that will likely dominate the department’s discussions next year. “We’re looking at Google Apps, we’re looking at the Microsoft suite of applications under the Exchange title. There’s a product called Zimbra which a number of small schools have migrated to, and a couple of schools are using a product called Mirapoint, which holds a much smaller market share,” Behrens said.

Although many campus users are most concerned about the e-mail aspect of the project, ITS is also looking at ways to enhance the accessibility and convenience of calendaring tools to all campus users. Most administrative staff and some faculty currently have access to Meeting Maker software, although this calendaring system is not available to students. 37 percent of students who responded to the survey indicated that they use calendaring tools on their computers. Behrens said he suspects that the majority of students who maintain such calendars do so through the popular Google Calendar application, which offers calendar sharing and Gmail integration. Gabriel Zacarias ‘09, a Gmail user, said that a college-wide calendaring system would have to offer superior functionality to warrant switching over. "Gmail is so clean and lightweight, whereas Swatmail isn’t reliable or as useful. If a new calendar system were integrated to have email alerts, that would be worth considering," Zacarias said.

Some faculty members use Google Calendar as well. Professor of Computer Science Lisa Meeden said that she recently switched to the Google application from a handheld Palm Pilot. Meeden, a relatively new user, said she is “still figuring out some of the functions of the Google Calendar, which allows you to share parts of your schedule publicly or keep certain events private.” Meeden said that the implementation of a public, campus-wide calendaring system could help users coordinate their busy schedules to identify a mutually convenient meeting time. “As a person who has to organize a lot of meetings, it would be nice to be able to see several calendars at once and find out instantly whether a particular time would be doable for the group,” Meeden said, adding that such a system would only be functional if the campus community as a whole agreed to participate.

“It would only really work if you had everyone on board. Faculty, like Swarthmore students, are very individualistic, and convincing everyone to use a common organizational strategy could be a tough sell,” Meeden said.

A synchronized calendaring system, if made available to students, staff and faculty, could enable users to perform multiple tasks through a single platform. Individuals could use the system to keep track of their personal daily schedules. Individuals belonging to groups could instantly view the availability of other members and make scheduling decisions based on that knowledge. “A calendaring system would enable the user to track collective events as well as individual events and know whether your individual calendar is compatible with the group calendar,” Behrens said.

Behrens said that many respondents to the survey prioritized the ability to share and send large files over calendaring tools. “Faculty, staff and students were all in agreement that the ability to exchange and edit large files is very important,” Behrens said. Based on the community’s clear preference for efficient document sharing tools, ITS has decided to raise the megabyte allowance for uploaded files and is exploring new and creative file sharing strategies.

Behrens said that one of the most significant findings to emerge from the survey data is the diversity of user preferences on campus. “We can’t characterize our population as using one set of tools,” he said. “What we’re seeing out there is an incredibly diverse environment.”

Behrens emphasized that any new program or system will have to address the many needs and preferences of campus users. “There’s no such thing as a once size fits all solution. We need a flexible solution that will accommodate these different tool sets.”

ITS will hold two open meetings next week to collect feedback from the community and take questions. Students, faculty and staff are invited to attend a lunchtime session at 12 p.m. on Monday in SCI 199, or one at 3:30 p.m. in Hicks Mural Room. Participants are advised to RSVP for the lunch event through the college’s event calendar.