A consolidated calendar infrastructure has now been made available university-wide to all UB faculty and staff. The UB Oracle Calendar Service provides an enterprise-class personal and group calendaring platform, accessible via multiple methods for flexible connectivity and business continuity.

Unix Oracle calendaring environment is up and running in the College of Arts & Sciences, and efforts are now focused within the School of Management.

Work has begun to gather the technical details and processes with the Science and Engineering Node Services (SENS) and Computer Science & Engineering (CSE) for migration.

A joint partnership has been established between Calendaring Implementation Team (CIT) and the College of Arts & Sciences (CAS) to support the Oracle Corporate Time. CIT will provide the infrastructure for the service and CAS will provide the front end support as the Oracle Calendar Application Administrator.

As a pre-requisite of the UB2020 UNIX E-mail consolidation implementation, the UNIX E-mail sub team has been working on presenting an advanced feature set for managing spam and filtering of e-mail. The team is in the process of testing the modified and upgraded infrastructure for this tool set. After the service has been tested, the team will provide the help desk with end user support and knowledge; roll out will follow.

Consultation with Academic Services to determine best timeframe for implementation of consolidating UNIX E-mail new capabilities is in progress, while discussions about hosting UNIX Calendaring between CAS and CIT is also occurring.

The UNIX E-mail implementation team facilitator, Larry Schnitzer, summed up that the 4 prerequisites to UNIX E-mail consolidation are expected to be ready for test in a week or two by the nodes and interested parties.

Updates were given for the five sub teams of the Servers and Services Consolidation project.

All of the sub-teams are meeting either weekly or bi-weekly, striving to have their preliminary budgets and design architectures completed by the end of April. Each hopes to have a group-specific timeline in place very soon in order to sequence the projects, identify the overlaps, and make decisions on key policy issues. Two key policies are the naming conventions of e-mail systems and the deleted mail retention period.

The group found that many people at UB continue to use UNIX. There are 54,000 e-mail accounts and approximately 2 million e-mails per day. The UNIX group has defined what it's currently working on and set up sub-teams of technical people to see if it makes sense to use a consolidated service. Regarding calendar consolidating, the group is in the process of figuring out who has infrastructure for calendaring. Resource requirements and a timeline are due at the end of March. The group is also discussing whether it makes sense to outsource e-mail accounts and they are waiting to hear back from SUNY legal.

The e-mail teams (Exchange and UNIX) are considering how common backend infrastructure can be utilized to provide each service and are developing a list of requirements generated by and tested with the customers.

The Servers and Services Consolidation sub-teams are gathering requirements and developing budget plans, with a target completion date of March 31. They are also in the process of collecting more server-related data for planning purposes, such as the server age and brand.

UNIX E-mail Implementation Team is determining the work breakdown structure of the project, and analyzing customer survey results. Results will determine infrastructure needs.

The UNIX E-mail Implementation team has launched.