What Mail System Are You Using?
What mail system are you using?
We are considering switching so another mail system other than what comes in the box. We are currently leaning towards hosting with Google, but we need to have a backup plan if we arn't able to do that.
Any suggestions?
--
Sean M. Carnahan
OneTech (Luminis) Portal Administrator
Arkansas Tech University
http://onetech.atu.edu
scarnahan@atu.edu
Email backend
We are using Microsoft Exchange 2007. Most of the faculty and staff use Microsoft Outlook (or Mozilla Thunderbird, or Apple Mail) and Webmail to manage their Inbox, and students mostly use webmail, with Microsoft Outlook support if they are interested.
I don't call the shots, but if I did I would move to Google mail in a heartbeat. Microsoft's strengths all lay inside Outlook, which is totally negated when managing your inbox via webmail. In terms of Microsoft webmail vs Google webmail, Google's features and integration run circles around its competition.
I think that pretty much any route you go will be advantageous over the built in Portal email. The unofficial word is that it is being deprecated anyway.
I 100% Agree:
We are doing the same thing, running Exchange 2007 for everyone. After reading bsimpson's post, I have to agree 100%.
Google is working hard to make their product/service web-based, while MS draws it strength from Outlook. We do offer the OWA (MOWA according to SunGard). This is a nice middle ground.
Hope this give you a bit more insight,
Robert Eickleberry
Portal Administrator/Developer
reickleberry@watc.edu
www.watc.edu
What supports your email?
We are currently using SunOne email and Google email.
Both are integrated into Luminis and both have stand alone access outside of Luminis. The accounts on Google are automatically populated based on role, and the new user is assigned a gmail role in Banner based on our business rules. "Once a Google user always a Google user" is our rule of thumb.
The decision was made July 2008, to assign all incoming freshmen and all new applicants to Google mail. This leaves the rest of the University students on SunOne email. As of this writing no passwords are updated at Google and no POP or IMAP is therefore available. The Google POP, IMAP and SMTP run on SSL ports.
The next freshman class will be assigned to Google this Spring 2009. This will make approximately 1/2 of the student body on Google. No faculty or staff are officially assigned to Google at this time.
In Luminis, based on the role, the user will be given either a SunOne icon or a Google icon. The logic inside of Luminis directs the user to the email system they have been assigned.
We are using the Sungard Google Adapter package, which was greatly improved at our site, for easier implementation.
T Combs
combstm@appstate.edu
Appalachian State University
Stand alone email
I'm curious, how did you accomplish stand alone access to the JES mail? Are the accounts still auto provisioned through luminis? Are you still in lock step with Sungard when it comes to versions of the JES mail server? As you can tell I have lots of questions. We have some major concerns about the integrated JES mail solution provided.
Kevin
Stand alone JES email
> I'm curious, how did you accomplish stand alone access to the JES
> mail? Are the accounts still auto provisioned through luminis?
The installation was done on Solaris 10 so that is the reference I am answering from.
The stand alone access is accomplished by using MMX on servers such as Sun V210 or V245. The MMX frontends were installed using the Sun Installer - not the Luminis process. The MMX servers are not part of the Luminis setup even though they still frontend access to the same email servers as are used by comexp inside Luminis. The MMX servers are load balanced so the user community can access their email by webmail, POP, or IMAP. All of these services are load balanced and the user only has to use the Virtual IP name to access. All accounts are still provisioned thru Luminis using AEAC (automatic email account creation). All access the same LDAP server for the email attributes, and username/password validation.
> Are you still in lock step with Sungard when it comes to versions of
> the JES mail server?
No. We are still using the 6.2 version of JES as delivered from Sungard with LuminisIV. However, we departed from the patch path which Sungard recommends in order to keep all of the components at 6.2. The recommendation from Sungard is to patch the servers to 6.3 but I felt that unless all components (including calendar) are at 6.3 there could be compatibility problems. There is a patch from Sun that fixes all of the problems seen with the initial install of SunOne 6.2 - 118207-63 for the mail servers, 116577-42 for calendar server.
There is a timezone problem for the calendar server as delivered from Sungard, and there is a timezone issue in that the timezone used to access the calendar from the portal is not the timezone specified in the configuration file at install - it is the one in /etc/TIMEZONE (Solaris).
> As you can tell I have lots of questions. We have some major
> concerns about the integrated JES mail solution provided.
What are your concerns? Maybe I can help with them.
I have not seen any postings about the problems described above.
I did extensive testing about recurring events and discovered these issues. We were early adopters of LuminisIV and converted from iPlanet Messaging Server 5.2 with mmx frontends. We have been on LuminisIV and JES 6.2 since October 15, 2007.
The JES 6.2 environment has been very solid once the patches were applied. Our few problems have been disk storage related.
T Combs
combstm@appstate.edu
Appalachian State University
Unbundle Sun Communications Suite from Luminis?
Hi. We're currently running the bundled Sun CS with Luminis 4. We're seeing user demand for better mobile device support, and a better web client. Both of those are supposedly available in Sun CS 6. Sungard intends to include them with Luminis 4.3, due in March, or so they say. It suspect it will be much longer and that the upgrade will be difficult at best.
I've found it very difficult to upgrade Sun email separately from Luminis - lots of errors that neither Sun or Sungard can help us with, and no support for added functionality like calendar sharing with Outlook Connector. Any LDAP/ACI changes are risky since there's a chance that they may break Luminis. It would be nice if we could upgrade Sun CS on our own schedule to take advantage of functional improvements. Do you think it's feasible to integrate a stand-alone instance of Sun CS with Luminis? Would we want or need a separate user LDAP? I'm also considering Google, Exchange, and Zimbra.
David Pelinka
Portland Community College
Plymouth Uses Zimbra
We have been running Zimbra for almost a year and a half now and are quite happy with how it has fit into our world. Additionally, we've custom built Zimbra Calendar and Email channels using PHP.
Zimbra PHP APIs
Our PHP Zimbra APIs are available here: http://code.google.com/p/zimbra-api-php/
This also includes info on how we do SSO and the Calendar and Email channels.
Integration of non-Luminis email/calendar solutions
How difficult was it to integrate other email/calendar systems with Luminis 4? I'm thinking specifically of embedded functions like group/course tools and targeted announcements. What integration tools did you use? I've seen mention of the "Sungard Google adapter package" - what is it and what does it do?
David Pelinka
Portland Community College
RE: Sungard Google adapter package
David,
The Sungard Google Adapter package is a package that includes both account provisioning and user mail access based on the role(s) of the users you want to be on Google Apps. We purchased the package and also worked with Sungard to make it more easily adaptable to user environments. Our business rules have the premise "once on Google always on Google" to avoid confusion as to where the email is located for the user.
The adapter part does account provisioning on Google using Message Broker as the middleman.
The email access part does a SAML SSO access to sign the user into the email provided using Google APPS. The email icon on Luminis is where our users expect to click to access their assigned email. The setup involves configuring Google to do SSO with your site.
I hope this helps...
T Combs
combstm@appstate.edu
Appalachian State University
google and announcements in groups
So I assume that the adapter correctly populates all the Sungard ldap values corresponding to the users email accounts, so that the group/course tools "email" link still works, and a group/course announcement still works?
As an instructor though, when you click the 'email' link in a group or course, what pops up to compose?
SunGard Google Adapter functionality
I'm totally with Jason on this.
The questions that he brought up are the major hold back for our moving to gmail. It will be kind of useless if the SunGard Google Adapter only deals with the e-mail channel.
Anyone has the answers or can confirm it?
Thanks,
Arion
Good Question...
We recently contacted SCT about the Google Connector. I got a statement of work back last week and there's nothing mentioned about the email functionality from group/course studio. In our conference call, we discussed what the final product might look like. Apparently, it doesn't actually use the built in email client in Luminis, but replaces the email link that opens a new page directly into Gmail.
So I'm not sure how the group/course studio email functions would work...I'll have to ask.
Thanks,
Sean M. Carnahan
OneTech (Luminis) Administrator
Arkansas Tech University
scarnahan@atu.edu
Google Adapter - Group Studio Email Issue
We went live with Google Apps integrated in Luminis IV Parallel in Sept. We used purchased the Google Apapter from SunGard and we integrated it. All in all, everything has been smooth sailing with the exception of Group Studio and Targeted Announcements. We did not have a Luminis system prior so, these issues haven't been a huge deal because we are slowly rolling out features. We recently found out that TA/Group Studio rely on settings that are not populated by the Google Adapter. I will post the solution once it is confirmed.
We are doing a Summit Presentation on the integration/ how we did it/ caveats associated with it. We did have SunGard make a bunch of custom changes, but I believe most were rolled into baseline. I'll post links to the material, if they are not included in the Summit Presentation section.
Calendar is not integrated at this time.
Don.
Updated Post and removed reference to GT_USER table, because it is not the problem. The problem is believed to be missing LDAP attributes.
Summit 09 Session 1250 - Integrating Google Apps and Luminis
If anyone is interested, here are the files from our SunGard 2009 Session on how we integrated Google Apps and Luminis using the SGHE Google Adaptor.
http://faculty.dccc.edu/~dsloat/summit
The issue we are having with Group Studio is because the Google Adaptor is not populating the required LDAP attributes. We have tested and confirmed the issue. I have been told that the required ldap attributes should be populated by default. We are working with SGHE to resolve the issue.
Don.
presentation
Thanks so much for doing this ... fantastic info.. Susan
We did some calculations and
We did some calculations and we figured out that with an average of 4 page loads per minute under our max load of 10 000 concurrent users, we'd be pumping out just over 20GB of data per minute on the University network. Sufficed to say that scared us a little.