TechTalks Transcript
Designing and Using Collaborative Environments
 Judith Boettcher [JB] |
 Howard Strauss [HS] |
 Nate Wilken [NW] |
 Randy Wiemer [RW] |
May 25, 2000
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JB: Welcome to the CREN TechTalk series for spring of the new millennium and to this session on "Designing and Using Collaborative Environments." You are here because it's time to discuss the core technologies for your future campus.
This is Judith Boettcher, your CREN host for today, and we'd first like to thank Microsoft for their support of this TechTalk and for their offer in conjunction with this session. Be sure to check out the TechTalk event page for that information.
Now, as always, let me welcome our technology anchor for TechTalk, Howard Strauss of Princeton. Howard is a well-known web and emerging portal expert. I'm going to have to get rid of the word "emerging" pretty soon, Howard, huh?
HS: I guess so.
JB: Okay.
HS: Now that I've given about six portal talks.
JB: I think that's probably the critical mass, right?
HS: Yep! Okay, thank you, Judith.
I'm Howard Strauss. I'm the technology anchor for today's TechTalk technology webcast. My goal as technology anchor is to engage our guest experts in a spirited technical dialogue that will raise the questions you'd like answered, and to pose those very important follow-up questions. You can ask our guest experts, Nate Wilken and Randy Wiemer, your own questions by sending e-mail to expert@cren.net any time during this webcast. If we don't get to your questions during the webcast, we'll provide answers in the webcast archive.
Humans have been collaborating face-to-face ever since Eve convinced Adam to take a bite of the apple. There's just something very tempting about sharing a meal together that is very conducive to gaining new knowledge and understanding.
It's a very short distance from sharing an apple in the Garden of Eden to sharing a power lunch or PowerPoint presentation on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley. People are very social creatures and they usually do their best work cooperatively. Collecting the right people in one place can create synergy and serendipity that's simply impossible when even the brightest people work alone.
But do people have to collaborate face-to-face to make this work? Adam and Eve had no choice. They had no e-mail, telephone or videoconferencing. If the serpent wanted to tempt Eve, e-mail was not an option! He had to do it face-to-face.
Today, face-to-face meetings have many downsides; the high cost of airplanes, hotel rooms and meals is one deterrent. Another is people's very busy schedules. To attend a one-hour meeting 1,000 miles away might cost you two days out of your office, and finding the same two days free from geographically dispersed people is a formidable, if not impossible task. There are also many meetings that would never occur if they had to be face-to-face. A face-to-face meeting is serious stuff. There needs to be a serious enough reason to go to all the trouble it takes to have one. This may be why some of the most productive face-to-face meetings are impromptu, in hallways or by the water cooler. You get all the advantages of a face-to-face meeting with very few of the costs.
Electronic collaboration avoids many of the costs of face-to-face meetings and has its own unique advantages as well. You never have to leave your own home or office. Every interaction in the meeting can be preserved and archived and there are electronic tools that let you have private conversations with any attendee while everyone is present.
But you cannot share a meal electronically, and many interactions that occur face-to-face would never occur if they had to be done electronically. Worldwide, companies spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year to bring people together face-to-face to collaborate. Billions more are spent on e-mail distribution lists, discussion groups, chat services, e-conferencing and other forms of electronic collaboration. No doubt, both modes of collaboration will coexist for some time to come.
Almost every software company offers products that do e-collaboration or assist in e-collaboration. Many products such as e-mail programs have become so commonplace that we don't even think of them as collaboration tools, but they are. And using them as such can enhance our productivity and even create synergy. For example, have you ever e-mailed to a folder or received e-mail from one? It's really a very useful thing to do.
If that seems like a strange thing to you, you'll want to listen to this webcast very carefully. And I guess I should remind you that Judith, Nate, Randy and I are all in different cities, as are the folks archiving this session. Any of you who can hear this are active participants in quite an advanced example of electronic collaboration. Please collaborate more with us by sending your questions electronically as we explore this neat new ability to work together on today's webcast of TechTalk.
Judith?
JB: Well, thank you very much, Howard, and I'd like to just take a moment, too, and just thank everyone for the URL's and some of the background material that we have on the website today. There's one web material that is from Stephen Acker at Ohio State University and he brings up some issues that have an actual real term for the difficulties in terms of getting together which is called "the friction of distance," which talks about some of the costs involved in getting together this way. So as we started preparing for the TechTalk today, we found that there were so many different kinds of collaboration that we really also said let's talk about which particular kind of collaboration that we're going to be focusing on.
And we'll be focusing on that as we get into our conversation with our experts today. We're very pleased to have two experts with us today, Randy Wiemer from the University of Missouri System Office and Nate Wilken from Arizona State University. Randy is the Associate Director of Information Technology for the University of Missouri System and is responsible for coordinating IT activities across the University's four campuses and extension programs. And very pertinent to today's session, he's been working to deploy a unified e-mail system with Microsoft Exchange for about the last two to three years. Nate is a senior application systems analyst for Information Technology at ASU. He manages a group on web and messaging applications. As part of that role, he is the lead manager of their Exchange Silver complex that's being developed at ASU.
Randy and Nate, thanks so much for joining us here on TechTalks today.
RW: Thanks for having me, Judith, Howard.
NW: Thank you for the invitation.
HS: Okay, the first thing, perhaps, we ought to get done with is to talk about -- as I said in my intro -- I talked a little bit about face-to-face communications vs. electronic collaboration. If we could just talk about why we should do electronic collaboration at all. Nate? Randy? Okay!
JB: That was a real show-stopper, Howard!
HS: Why do we want to do this? What are some of the advantages of electronic collaboration over face-to-face? I mean, you folks are doing it and so are we.
NW: Right. I think several of the advantages that you mentioned before are pretty important.
HS: I thought I was just talking about Adam and Eve, though.
NW: All right! Well, at Arizona State University, there's obviously a burden to collaborating face-to-face with people. There's a time commitment involved in just organizing face-to-face interaction. If you have a large group of people, it takes a significant amount of time and scheduling to get everybody together at the same time.
RW: I would think your notion of friction of distance, I think there's another component to this, which is the friction of time, Judith. To have a face-to-face, we must all be present at the same time and so many forms of electronic collaboration permit us to do it at times that are convenient to each of our own schedules.
NW: Right, so there's not just a geographic dispersion, but sort of a time or temporal dispersion of participants.
HS: Could we talk about some of the different kinds of electronic collaboration? I know that I mentioned e-mail and some other things, but what kind of different kinds of electronic collaboration are folks doing?
RW: We do a tremendous amount of videoconferencing at the University of Missouri. We've got offices in every county in the state. We've got four campuses and for a number of years, we've had a private dedicated nailed-up video network with very sophisticated broadcast-type rooms where videoconferencing can take place. More recently, that is switching and using TCP/IP as the transport and we're able now to do it in locations where we have not, in the past, had dedicated circuits. So videoconferencing has been a long player in collaboration.
HS: And that's very high-end stuff there, right? You're saying that traditionally you need very special equipment in special rooms and things.
RW: That historically has been the case and we've made those investments, but now we're starting to recover a lot of those expenditures and getting rid of the leased circuits and just doing it on the TCP/IP network.
HS: So just grabbing some camera that's just connected to the Internet?
RW: Correct. Or a dedicated device that's plugged into the Ethernet port that has all the components built into it.
JB: So you're keeping the high-end devices in the rooms but you're --
RW: Well, we're substituting. We're replacing the older technology with newer stuff that, instead of having a leased circuit or always an ISDN type circuit, it just goes on the Ethernet, the TCP/IP circuits.
HS: Right, but using the Internet, of course, you probably don't get quite as good service. So video images, I would guess, are more jerky.
RW: Depends on the bandwidth, and among our campuses, we've got sufficient bandwidth.
JB: Oh, okay.
HS: Okay, so you're saying what you do inside, that you're doing it across your Intranet.
RW: Correct.
HS: Then you're using some kind of fiber campus backbone that has high bandwidth and you can actually get some kind of guaranteed quality of service.
RW: Correct.
HS: Sounds great!
NW: I'd say at ASU, there's a certain amount of videoconferencing that happens, but I think more significant is the interaction that happens between students and students -- students and other students -- using e-mail, discussion groups, distribution lists, listserv lists, third party portal products that are coordinated by colleges on campus. And there's student-faculty collaboration that's done using those same means, in addition to, for instance, Blackboard Course Info and Collabra.
And then there's collaboration that happens between faculty members and between staff and faculty and between staff members that includes all of those above (with maybe the exception of Collabra and Blackboard) and includes collaboration that happens via public folders, via shared event calendars, shared scheduling of resources and videoconferencing.
HS: Okay, you mentioned a whole bunch of things. Maybe we could take these things one at a time.
NW: Right.
JB: I think that would probably be a good idea!
HS: And just talk about how they're used. I mean, it seems like the lowest common denominator of all these things is e-mail.
NW: Definitely.
HS: And again, when I talked to some folks about e-mail, they said, "No, that's not a collaborative tool." And I think it's just used so commonly that people don't even think of it as what it can be used for. It's just how I just dash messages off to people. But how is that being used as a collaborative tool?
NW: Well, there's any phone conversation is a collaboration between two people in the same way that an e-mail message is collaboration between two people, but there's also the analogue to a conference call. There's a distribution list and I think a distribution list sort of satisfies all the requirements of collaboration in that you have a large group of people, potentially, and they're all working together to answer some problem, you know, to answer some question, solve some problem, to --
HS: So how --
RW: To collaborate, it means to me, you know, one component of it is people sharing information. And e-mail is a tremendous tool for sharing information.
JB: So in its simplest form, then, the definition of collaboration, you would say, is simply the sharing of information so that as we looked at all of these different ways of communicating, that's basically -- that is one of the lowest common denominators of collaboration, then.
RW: Yeah, without that component, I'm not certain collaboration takes place.
NW: It's a prerequisite.
JB: Okay. I think that, you know, as we started looking at some of the information about collaboration, I think we quickly do get into going beyond the sharing of information to actually doing joint projects together, and actually managing and communicating with each other.
NW: The actual problem-solving.
JB: Thank you. You saved me there. And problem solving. In terms of the e-mail that you have at ASU and University of Missouri, you mentioned that distribution list a couple of different times, so do you have an easy way of dealing with distribution lists?
HS: Oh, and are those different than listprocs?
NW: Yes, I'd say they're definitely different than listprocs. What I'm referring to as a distribution list is an exchange distribution list, sort of like a listserv list on our Exchange system.
HS: So that's what Exchange calls listprocs. They call listprocs distribution lists?
NW: Yeah, I'd say so.
HS: But they're different in some way.
NW: They're different in that distribution lists are much -- I think primarily, distribution lists are much easier to use. They're manageable via an interface that most users are fairly comfortable with using, whereas with a listserv list or a listproc list -- generally difficult to train people to administer those lists, so --
HS: Okay, besides being easier to administer, are they different in any other way?
NW: Well, at Arizona State University, our distribution lists -- the distribution lists that we've created sort of mirror the hierarchy of our organization, so it's easy for people to communicate with other people at the University because, for instance, they would know the name of a distribution list that they need to send mail to.
And distribution lists can be used to control access to public folders on the Exchange system and the public folders at ASU also mirror our organizational hierarchy, so it's very easy for administrators of public folders to restrict access to public folders based on distribution list membership.
HS: Who has access to building these distribution lists? I mean, can any -- if I'm an office administrator, can I build my own lists?
NW: You can request that, if you have a special project that you want to facilitate with the use of a new distribution list, you can contact the Electronic Messaging Team and they can set up a distribution list for you. And they can set it so that you're able to manage it yourself.
RW: We have a very similar protocol at University of Missouri. We've got a web page where the distributed IT people across the University are able to go to the web page and create a DL on that page, you know, give all the pertinent information --
HS: Oh, a DL, a Distribution List.
RW: Distribution list, right.
HS: Takes me just another second there!
RW: And then about every 15 minutes, those things are gathered up and batched into our Exchange system.
JB: It may be important as we get into talking about public folders and distribution lists and those kinds of things to share with folks just what are the components of the particular collaborative environment that you're developing based on the Exchange server. We talked earlier about the fact that there's lots of kinds of collaboration and we're finding, too, that there's lots of different kinds of what might be called designed collaborative environments. And you both are working in one very specific collaborative environment. Is that fair to say?
RW: I would agree.
NW: Yes, I would agree also. It's a very sophisticated collaborative environment.
JB: Right. And there's three or four different components of that collaborative environment, is that right?
RW: At least that many.
JB: At least that many! Ah!
HS: Tell us about the three or four major ones.
JB: Yeah, the most important ones.
HS: Whatever the big breakout is.
NW: I would say e-mail is included. We mentioned that as a base for all collaboration. There's distribution lists that we talked about also. There are public folders, which we briefly brushed on, that are sort of a place for publishing information to everybody within the organization. There's the ability for -- Exchange is also a calendaring system, so users are able to share their calendars with other people. They're able to share the scheduling of meetings, of resources, conference rooms and equipment.
HS: What about discussion groups? Does Exchange include discussion groups, chat rooms?
NW: Chat, I don't --
RW: Not in a real-time sense, although the delivery of the e-mail within this environment is nearly instantaneous. So you can have a chat-like dialogue just via e-mail because there is no delay in the sending.
NW: But discussion groups can exist within public folders. You can thread discussions within a public folder.
RW: And the public folder can also be a host or an interface to the Net News itself. We do that here.
HS: Okay, we're not going to be able to avoid this much longer. We keep -- you keep talking about public folders and I think, for a lot of folks, that's a new concept. Maybe you could tell us what public folders are and how they're used.
RW: Take it, Nate!
NW: A public folder is -- it's sort of like a network shared folder that exists within the Exchange server itself.
HS: So this folder lives on the Exchange server.
NW: Yeah, the public folders live on the Exchange server and everybody who has access to the Exchange server potentially has access to these public folders. And it's a place for collecting information that you want to have available to the public.
RW: Although that's somewhat of a misnomer because you can put access control restrictions on a public folder.
JB: So it could be a private -- a semi-private folder, huh?
RW: Absolutely!
NW: Right.
JB: Okay, I can see this analogy here.
HS: Can we have -- I mean, do these folders have hierarchical structure? Can I have folders inside folders?
RW: Absolutely.
NW: Yes. As I mentioned, our public folder hierarchy mirrors our organization, so we have a Departments public folder that contains a folder for each of the departments and an Academic Units folder that, say, contains a folder representing our college of Liberal Arts, which contains sub-folders for each department within the college.
HS: And what's this look like to the user of Exchange? I'm sitting on my PC somewhere and we've got this whole hierarchical structure of folders.
NW: It really looks like folders in your file manager, in your Explorer.
HS: So it looks like another disk. It looks like my L disk or something.
NW: Sure.
HS: And I just wander off to this thing and I can just drag and drop things into it. That kind of thing.
NW: Yeah.
HS: I just treat it as though it really is just another disk somewhere.
NW: Right. And when you select a public folder, you'll see its contents, either -- its configurable how you view the information inside a public folder. You can actually view the items themselves or you can construct a form, a custom form that controls how you see the information in there, or you can build a web page and have the web page display when you select the public folder. There are many different ways.
HS: What kind of things can you keep in these public folders? I mean, you mentioned web pages, so I could put a web page in a public folder?
NW: You could put a web page in a public folder. You could put a mail message in a public folder. Public folders can actually receive mail messages. We'll talk about that in a minute. It can contain documents, it can contain --
RW: Appointments.
NW: --content, appointments, right.
RW: Tasks.
NW: You might want to keep an event calendar in a public folder. Yeah, tasks.
RW: Maybe we can roll it back just a little bit further.
HS: Sure.
RW: Unlike a Unix Send Mail environment, Microsoft Exchange is a transactional database. It's just a bunch of records in a relational database and there are some main record types. We've got mail messages, we've got appointments, we've got tasks on a to-do list. And then the Outlook client that we use takes that material and gives it a graphical representation according to what particular kind of record is being displayed.
HS: Outlook is the client for the Exchange server?
RW: One of many clients, but it's the preferred client when you've got an Exchange server because it exposes most all the features that are available in Exchange, whereas a Eudora client or some other mail client wouldn't permit you to see a calendar appointment in the context of a graphical calendar. You would see the accompanying message, but you wouldn't see it represented as an appointment from 10:00 to noon on a Thursday.
NW: Right, primarily all of our staff and faculty members with Exchange accounts use Outlook to access their calendars.
HS: And they use outlooks on Macs and PC's?
NW: Macs and PC's, yes.
HS: Is there an Outlook client on Unix boxes?
NW: Outlook Web Access is available from Unix Workstations which is -- Outlook Web Access is a web interface to an Exchange user's mailbox.
RW: and in that mode, it attempts to represent things the same as you would see in a native Outlook client. And it does a fairly good job, but there are some limitations with what you can do via the browser.
HS: So you have all the facilities that you would want on a Mac or a PC and you have most of the facilities, if you're on something else, through this web client, this web version of Outlook.
RW: Correct.
NW: Right.
JB: I forget right now, Randy and Nate, I apologize. One of you described, I believe, an online consulting system that you're using in which you make good use of the public folder technology.
NW: Maybe I can describe that a little better.
JB: Yeah, that would be good.
NW: That was me!
JB: And that's Randy, right?
NW: No, this is Nate.
JB: See, I knew I would do that! Okay.
NW: Well, we have --
RW: One of the limitations of not being face-to-face!
JB: There you go, okay.
NW: Exactly. One of the best examples, I think, of the best use of public folders that we have here is an online consulting system that our help desk uses. Like I mentioned, the public folder can receive mail messages. It can have an e-mail address, so we have an e-mail address at ASU that customers can send questions to and the question arrives in the public folder. It's archived in a sub-folder, and consultants just watch incoming messages in this public folder. When they log in, come into work, they watch these incoming messages and then the group of consultants can select a message, take it out of this group folder and respond to it and have a reply go into another archive folder. And these archived answers can be made publicly available to everybody on the Exchange system�
JB: Okay.
NW: So that's one example.
JB: And that's where people are really sending to and receiving messages, then, from a public folder, which we always thought of -- it was hard to think about that at first.
NW: Right, it's analogous to a shared mailbox.
HS: You also talked about some kind of forms frontend to these public folders. Could you give us an example of an application that uses a forms frontend?
NW: Well, we have the Electronic Messaging Team also does consulting to customers and we have a folder that we use for frequently asked questions. And when you go to the frequently asked questions folder, a form which is -- it's, let's see, how to describe a form. It looks like a web form, I would say, any other form that you would fill out on a web page. It has boxes that you can fill in information and you can describe the information that you're looking for and the form can be used to find a particular message in the public folder that might be -- it can be used to search or it can be used to enter new information into the FAQ folder. The form is really for automation of common tasks, I guess, that you would want to perform on a group of objects in a public folder.
RW: And we use them in a slightly different context. Our Outreach and Extension program has reporting requirements for customer contact and activities that the people working in that arm of the University must provide each month. Historically, they did it on a paper form that would then get shipped back to the Extension office. Today, they do it using Outlook and a form or a template for an e-mail message so it prompts them. It's a very structured form where they must fill in certain elements and then hit SEND and it gets delivered, then, to a public folder.
HS: Why is this a better way to do it than just using a web form? I mean, it sounds like I could do some of this stuff on the web.
NW: You could do some of that on the web, but since it's integrated into the Exchange environment, it's very simple for someone to customize a form who's using Exchange and to publish it, you're actually editing it in the place where it's published.
HS: If I build one of these forms, do I have to write any scripts or anything?
NW: You don't have to, no. There are some basic forms provided that you can customize by adding more fields or removing fields. You really pick the action that you want the form to perform. Like, say you want the form to mail a message, as Randy was describing. Well, if there's common information that you want to be included in all mail messages that are sent to your help desk, you could ask questions of the user and have them fill out the information. All you're doing is adding fields to this form and that data will be included in the mail message that's mailed.
HS: Yeah, how about if we handle a couple questions? We have one that just came in and we have a related one that came in earlier. The question that just came in, came in from J. Golden at Cal State, and I'm sorry, J. Golden I don't know your first name. But he or she asks, "What tools are used for collaboration between Windows and Macintosh users?"
NW: Well, I would say Exchange. Exchange is available, the client is available -- the Outlook client is available for both Macintosh and Windows. Anything you can do in Exchange, you can do between a Mac user of Outlook and a Windows Outlook user.
JB: And you had mentioned Eudora as well, so that is also a method of collaboration as well?
RW: Well, Eudora and nearly any standard compatible mail client will work with the Exchange server, but you forfeit some of these more sophisticated features. With Eudora, you're not going to see these public folders, you know, in the same user interface.
JB: Okay, so that comes back to the fact that this is a specific collaborative environment that is highly integrated, then.
RW: Correct.
JB: Okay.
RW: Another one we've barely touched on it group scheduling. Within the Exchange environment, individuals can have calendars and others can make appointment requests against their calendar. They can see the free/busy schedule of an individual so that they can have the system find the first available time when these five individuals can get together and this conference room is free or this video projector is available.
NW: The Plan a Meeting tool is very useful.
JB: Okay. Did you want to ask a couple other questions, Howard?
HS: Yeah, a related question to this -- actually, a probably more general question -- is from John Wadleski at University of Memphis and John says, "What are the best collaboration tools and what are the greatest challenges of implementing each?" We'll let you go for the next couple hours on this.
JB: Right, that's really broad! You can answer that any way you like there!
RW: Hey, the telephone is still my best collaborative tool.
JB: There you go, that's a good one, all right.
HS: But I think if we were to imagine what John was asking, I mean, I think that's probably true, a telephone works really well. I bet I use e-mail more than I use the telephone today.
RW: True, but if I need to get something done in real time as quickly as possible, I'll still page somebody or get them on the phone. E-mail, you know, I do, I use more e-mail than I do phone, but phone if I need quick results.
HS: I guess around here, nobody ever answers their phone. I wind up talking to answering machines anyway. Might as well send an e-mail message.
JB: Maybe we could interpret this in terms of our teaching and learning environments. You had both mentioned the collaboration between faculty and students. What would you say is the favorite collaboration tool at your campus between faculty and students?
NW: I would say discussion groups.
JB: Pardon?
NW: I would say discussion groups.
JB: And how are those implemented at your campus?
NW: Well, we have Collabra, which is basically threaded news available via the web.
HS: Collabra is a product of who? Who makes Collabra?
NW: Netscape, I believe.
HS: Okay, and is there nothing in Exchange that does that kind of thing?
NW: Well, at ASU, students aren't on the Exchange system.
HS: How come?
NW: Cost. I would say is a major consideration, the cost of adding and training students to use the Exchange system.
RW: And we are heading down that path. At the University of Missouri, we're a year into moving our students into Exchange. At this point, we've got about 20,000. We'll do another 15,000 this summer and probably the last 20 or so thousand the next summer.
HS: Is it cheaper in Missouri to do this?
NW: I'd say at ASU, we just have -- we have a lot of money invested in infrastructure for other systems, so --
JB: So that you perhaps had those already in place?
NW: Right, that we wouldn't want to just abandon.
JB: Okay. Let's see, what about going on with a kind of related question that came in from Gina Funero at Stanford was asking, "What tools have been successfully used for collaborative projects such as group web pages or collaborative essays?" Would one of you like to try and shed some light on that question from Gina?
RW: I would first have to understand specifically what it is they're trying to accomplish. It sounds from the question that they're looking to have multiple people simultaneously edit a web page or edit a document, and that's a tough technical trick. To manage the concurrency of updates coming from multiple sources. If you want to do it serially, any of a number of tools will do the job. You can make your changes and e-mail it to the next person or save it to a shared folder on a network drive and edit them in turn, and even use features in something like Word to track changes. But if you're wanting to put something out there where three or four or more people can edit it simultaneously, kind of like a white board that's interactive, good luck!
JB: What's the best -- is there a best tool that you might recommend right now?
RW: If I had to go do something like this, I can imagine using a remote-control type tool on a PC, like PC Anywhere or VNC. And everybody would simultaneously be fighting for the keyboard or the mouse on the machine on which you're actually doing the edit. And somehow you would have to coordinate, you know, at any moment in time, who gets to do the typing.
HS: Can't you do that with Net Meeting?
NW: There's a white board available in Net Meeting, but I think Randy's referring to a product that actually lets a remote user control the desktop.
HS: Oh, of another machine.
NW: Of another machine.
JB: Oh, okay, all right. What about Net Meeting? We have a question from Steve Dunavent from Gulf Coast Community College down here in Panama City, Florida, and he mentions that Microsoft Net Meeting gives great potential for collaboration except that he's worried about the bandwidth that that kind of intensive collaboration requires. Have you been using Net Meeting on your campus?
NW: In a limited way at ASU. There are some Net Meetings going on now, I'm sure. Maybe. I would say the difficulty comes with the audio portion. When you're having a collaborative discussion with somebody, if you're using, say, videoconferencing, it's not as important for images to be immediately visible to the other collaborator. But audio is pretty important, so meetings have taken place over the telephone simultaneously with Net Meeting.
JB: Okay, so you use a combination of technologies to achieve that, and that addresses the limits in bandwidth right now.
HS: I believe Net Meeting supports audio.
NW: Yes, it does. It does, but if you have low bandwidth, then, you know, it's very difficult to collaborate with someone when the audio is choppy.
RW: Or lagging behind.
NW: Whereas with video, if the video is choppy or lagging behind, it doesn't really affect--you know, if you still have audio, then I'd say it doesn't impact the process.
JB: Yeah, I remember years ago doing that combination of telephone with CU/CME was coming out from Cornell. That's many years ago! So at any rate, let me just remind our listeners that this is a broad topic and we'll be able to take some more questions so go ahead and send them in right now. It's a good time.
HS: Okay, I'd like to raise the issue of anonymous access. One of the things about any kind of e-mail system or discussion group or chat group or anything like that is that -- can people be anonymous? Do you allow anonymous access? If you do, what's the danger and how do you get around it?
RW: We work very hard here to authenticate all our users and confirm that we know who they are and that the recipient of an e-mail can be assured that the sender is who they claim to be. So we have no formal means of supporting some anonymous access.
Now, there are many remailers on the net so that you could certainly go beyond the university and send mail into our system and we can't vouch for it. I think Nate talked the other day about a little different approach there, or was that you, Howard? That had a course.
HS: Yeah, we had a very special course here where it was important that people be anonymous and since then, I've thought about other cases where I think you'd really want people to be anonymous. For example, if you had an online counseling system where people wanted to protect their identity, somebody wanted to ask a question about something. You know, perhaps AIDS or something like that, where perhaps they didn't want their identity to be know, it'd be nice to be able to do anonymous access.
NW: Right. At ASU, we try to limit that sort of -- we try to limit the activity, that sort of activity on ASU resources. There are anonymous remailers available out on the Internet, but as far as having, say, somebody affiliated with the university send an anonymous piece of mail to another person at the university, you can see how there's great potential for abuse.
HS: Yeah, but have either of you seen a problem like that? Has anybody used one of these remailers or done something that exploited this?
NW: Well, we've definitely had a problem with a small, not necessarily a significant problem, with people sending -- people trying to send anonymous mail but generally, we're able to track down who they are. We've blocked a couple of anonymous remailers from sending mail into the university.
RW: And we have the same issues. We're continually getting complaints about abusive mail and things like that, so we devote a significant amount of staff time to tracking those kind of episodes down.
HS: I assume that both of you just have some kind of university policy that says don't annoy people with e-mail.
NW: Right. We have an Acceptable Use policy that prohibits misrepresenting who you are in any kind of electronic communication. So anonymous mailing sort of, I wouldn't say it misrepresents who you are but it obscures who you are.
HS: You're both, Nate and Randy, you're really in two quite different universities, right? And if I were to ask you to categorize the electronic collaboration that goes on at your campus, how would you do that? Nate?
NW: Well, there's a lot of -- you mean in terms of what sort of collaboration happens or what collaboration is being used?
HS: Yeah, where are you in the spectrum of collaboration? I mean, you know, are you early in the thing and just a couple things are happening or you've got some real mature things happening? What's it look like in terms of the state of electronic collaboration?
NW: I'd say we have a pretty mature view of that, I guess, but a lot of collaboration is happening, definitely, and it's happening via resources that have been available for quite a while.
RW: I would have to say here, we're diverse. I mean, I don't think anybody knows the full extent to which activities are going on. You asked about Net Meeting. Personally, I've not used Net Meeting in any meaningful way, but I'm certain there are many people at the university who have and do it on a daily basis.
HS: So things are really -- these tools are tools that anybody can pick up. They don't have to be done centrally?
RW: I believe that's very true.
HS: So lots of folks could be using stuff. I know that a lot of folks have been just taking Word documents and inserting comments in them and then passing them around and other people insert comments in them and things like that. And that's a really nice way to collaborate, but you'd never know it was going on. I mean, it's not something done centrally.
JB: Well, it's not tracked, anyway.
HS: Well, right, it's not something --
RW: And people don't need help to do it.
HS: You get somebody a copy of Word and they may choose to do it or they may not choose to do it and you may never know -- well, you wouldn't even know if they had a copy of Word, truthfully, I think on most campuses. I mean, I think that things just go on. But it sounds like with the Exchange server, that is something that is done centrally.
RW: It's done centrally and the whole notion was e-mail has become so critical that there's no reason for it not to be available to everybody in a very competent and managed way.
HS: In doing that, have you had to say that you're going to use one kind of e-mail and is everybody going to use IMAP or is everybody going to use POP or is everybody going to use --
RW: That was a point that was debated very early on in this effort of ours to consolidate around a single platform and fortunately, with a product like Exchange, we don't have to dictate what e-mail client anyone chooses to use. They can use a POP client or an IMAP client or a MAPI client or they can come at it through the web. So we are able to permit some broad range of choice on the individual employee or student's part.
HS: But if they do that, can they do things like share attachments?
RW: If their client supports the attachments, yeah, it'll transport through the system with no problem.
HS: Right, but --
RW: Well, people who want to tell that to a Unix machine and run PINE from a desktop machine to you know, then getting that attachment is the same age-old problem they've had all along. But with a tool like this, we're discovering more and more people are abandoning that kind of tool and are going with a PC based or Mac based e-mail client.
HS: And which e-mail clients are the most prevalent ones?
RW: In certain quarters of the university, like our hospital, they're able to simply say, "Look, there's only one platform we'll support within the hospital, the teaching hospital. It's Microsoft Outlook." So in that environment, we've got 5,000 people all using Microsoft Outlook. Our city campus has pretty much been successful at getting all of their employees to use Outlook, so that's over 2,000. At our Columbia campus, there are about five or six thousand employees and by 9:00 every morning, we've got about 2,300 users connected via Outlook. The other 2,500 or so users in any given day are using POP and IMAP clients.
HS: What's it look like at Arizona State, Nate?
NW: I'd say at Arizona State, we don't try -- we want the central service to be available to everybody so that if somebody wants to send mail to everybody on campus, you know, everyone will receive it in at least one place. But there are other systems available. We don't want to force our researchers to use the system that we use to conduct university business. They -- that might be seen as a hindrance to research, so people can still have other accounts on other systems.
HS: Do either of you see Unix mail disappearing? Or is this kind of collaboration stuff and Exchange servers and things not having any effect?
NW: I'd say it's having an effect. I don't see Unix mail disappearing anytime soon. I think it'll be around for a long time.
RW: Yeah, and it won't go away here but, you know, the vast, vast majority of e-mail will be transported and held in our Exchange systems.
JB: Now, you had mentioned that it takes more than one of these Exchange servers to really manage the number of users that you have at Missouri, is that right?
RW: Correct. And I counted them. We've got about 30 machines right now that are running Exchange statewide. We've got --
HS: You have 30 Exchange servers?
RW: Thirty Exchange servers. Some of them don't do anything other than hold public folders, some of them are dedicated to doing SMTP Internet connectivity. Some of them are doing directory application. These are just PC's that sit in data centers around the state. Of that 30, there are about eight of them that are holding the private messages of individuals, so these are the ones that have a lot of disk and a lot of processor on them and are doing the bulk of the work.
NW: I'd say, on a sufficiently configured machine, that you'd want to hold no more than 1,500 to 2,000 users.
RW: Well, we break that rule big time, then!
NW: Oh, really? Even more than that per server?
RW: Yeah, I've got one server where we've got 30,000 mailboxes on it right now.
NW: Wow!
HS: How much mail -- well, these 30,000 mailboxes, when somebody saves mail, do they save it on their local machine or do they save it all on the Exchange server?
RW: They save it on the Exchange server. Actually, they have the choice. They can save it on the Exchange server or they can POP it to a PC or they can have it in both places.
HS: And do you restrict people to how much --
RW: We do have storage -- we do have quotas. Depending on which campus or site we're talking about, the quotas are different. The machine with 30,000 students on it, the quota right now is 10 megabytes per user. They begin to get warnings at 10 megabytes, so we've not hit that. At this time, there's about 55 gigabytes of mail on that machine,�
NW: I'd say there's a finite amount of mail that anyone needs access to, you know, at any one point in time, so --
HS: But doesn't everybody save all -- I mean, I am sure that I have mail saved away somewhere that I've never looked at and probably never will from 1980.
RW: With the machines three years, I've got every message I've ever sent or received on it, virtually.
NW: Typically, those messages will be stored in personal folders and local disk space.
RW: Correct.
HS: So just keep buying bigger and bigger desktop machines.
RW: Yeah, but in my Outlook client, I've got an auto-archiving rule. I save it for ten days or after 14 days, move the mail to my archive folder on my local machine. So it just automatically gets, as it ages out, it gets moved down to my local hard drive.
JB: So if we haven't heard from you in ten days, we need to probably send you another note, huh?
RW: Well, no, but that's all integrated in my view of the world. I see it all. It's all instantly available to me.
JB: Okay. We have some other questions, I think, that we want to get to as we are approaching the end of our session and also we might have time for a couple more questions, if people want to send them in. Howard, do you want to ask another question?
HS: Sure, actually, there's a wonderful question from Albert Userhoff at FSU -- that's Florida State University?
JB: Yeah, that's just down the street here.
HS: Right, okay, and he says -- actually, it's kind of an interesting collaboration question. He says, "Within this TechTalk, how are the four of you communicating with each other?" Well, Albert, we're just using a telephone bridge. It's a very, very simple kind of thing. Right, Judith? There's nothing more to it than that.
JB: That's right, it's a telephone bridge and then what we do have is there's a fifth person online that is really a machine that's taking the signal and digitizing it and sending it out over the web.
HS: Right, so we're actually encoding this thing into some streaming audio format that you'll get to a little bit later. Albert, if you want to hear this again, if hearing it once was not enough, you can go out and hear it again or your friends can hear it, and what we'll do later is we'll transcribe the thing. We'll transcribe the thing the way things are transcribed traditionally. Somebody's going to listen to the thing and transcribe it.
Albert says, "are there audio based collaborative tools other than the telephone that allow a small group of individuals to interactively communicate with each other?" Well, one we mentioned was Microsoft Net Meeting. Do you, Nate, know of any others, or Randy?
RW: I'm not very versed in it, although I know we're all paying attention to IP telephony and looking at opportunities to collapse the networks so that we only have to worry about a single wire.
JB: Well, that's a good point, and we did have a session on IP telephony in the TechTalks, I think it was late last fall, so that certainly is a way that would actually -- what's that word? -- disintermediate, make it so that people don't really have to go through a scheduling service, actually.
HS: And actually, since that TechTalk (where I had never used IP telephony and no one had ever contacted me with IP telephony), since then, it is unbelievable the number of people who now have called me at home, in my office, whatever and they called me using IP telephony. The stuff is popping up all over. There's lots of free IP telephony services.
JB: After receiving my phone bill just recently again, I'm going to have to start using it more myself! We have another really good question coming in for our experts from Truman at midwest.org. Not certain whether it's a him or a her here, but the question is very good. How do you manage the ID's across the 30 Exchange servers? And that's, I guess, for you, Randy.
RW: He has identified the key to success in an operation like what I'm running.
JB: Okay, I knew it was a good question.
RW: You know, directory services was probably the Achilles heel of our prior mail environment. You could not find an e-mail address of somebody, even though you knew they worked here. We couldn't mail to our employees. We didn't know who had e-mail, who did not. So that was the lever that got the administration, you know, to push everybody into a single platform.
The way it works, we've got our administrative systems are still legacy applications running on an IBM mainframe. We are in the midst of converting those to a PeopleSoft, but in the interim, we've got a data warehouse in Unix and Oracle that every night we get wholesale updates from our administrative legacy systems. In that warehouse, we have introduced a new dataset that we call SSO and so we feed all new students, all new employees and do updates into this synthesized dataset.
And it's from that environment that we have web applications written over the top of that and we manage Exchange from there. So we've got real time Oracle web-based interactive tools that we can distribute, you know, account creation permissions and what-not. And so it's a set of Oracle web-based applications that we manage the Exchange system with it.
NW: At ASU, we have the same sort of mechanism for populating our directory. We extract data from student information systems and Human Resources and the electronic post office databases to import into the Exchange global address list.
HS: Do either of you still have people who don't have e-mail? When you said if we wanted to e-mail to all the people?
NW: Actually, we do. We still have staff members on campus that don't regularly use e-mail, so --
RW: It's fewer than five percent here.
HS: But does that prevent you from saying that you're going to send out some notice from HR or something like that and it's going to be e-mail only? Or do you do that anyway?
RW: Well, it prevents us from saying it's e-mail only, but we can reduce the number of those that get a paper copy to just those non e-mail-using employees.
NW: Right.
HS: And you don't just go over and give them a good shake and say, "You have to use e-mail!"?
NW: Right!
RW: We've got janitors and groundskeepers on the football field and there are people whose jobs simply don't --
HS: Okay, they just don't have access to a computer.
RW: Yeah, you know.
HS: Right. That's a very --
NW: That don't require access to a computer.
HS: That's actually a very interesting problem and actually, we could chat about that in some TechTalk. It's really an interesting thing to follow up. We've looked at solving that problem as well, the people who don't have --
RW: And some of those people would say, "Hey, it's not a problem!"
JB: Well, and in fact, I can see the PDA's may in fact start solving that one in the not-too-distant future. Since they won't need computers, desktop or laptop computers, they can have a smaller device like the expanded pager or something that will be able to handle some other things.
HS: Yeah, that's actually an interesting idea.
RW: Do it all with wireless.
JB: Yeah! And then you've got wireless, right. Be perfect for the grounds folks.
HS: Yeah, that's actually a great idea. We'll have to think about that!
JB: All right, we are a little bit past time here, Howard, and we usually have a very practical question that we ask to kind of wrap things up. Do you want to do that one?
HS: Sure. Okay. Here's our practical question. Actually, I think all the questions we did really here were practical, but Nate and Randy, if there's a university out there listening -- and there's lots of them out there -- they'd like to know, "How do we get started in doing this kind of stuff?" It sounds like both your universities are pretty far along on using some of these collaborative tools. How do universities get started doing this? Where do you start?
NW: I would say anybody wanting to get started with Exchange to take advantage of Microsoft's offer on the event website. Might be a great way to get started.
HS: There's two offers there. Which one? I looked at them. Which one should they take advantage of?"
NW: The one for -- there's one for Exchange 5.5 and one for Exchange 2000, I think, but to become a part of the Corporate Preview Program, I believe, that's what those are. Identify some hardware to install the preview software and give it a whirl.
JB: Okay, good. Let's see, who -- Nate, did you want to answer the practical question?
NW: Actually, that was me! Randy?
JB: At least now I'm being consistent, anyway!
HS: Now you see one of the difficulties in just using audio here! Right, it's very hard, especially -- it's audio, it's a telephone bridge, and there's very narrow bandwidth here so it's sometimes difficult to tell one voice from another.
NW: Right, next time we'll use Net Meeting.
RW: I would think in some of this, the technology's perhaps the easier part. It's getting people to agree on a particular approach. If you want to do it with e-mail and somebody else wants to do it with chat, you've got to get an agreement before you can collaborate electronically.
HS: In a lot of things that look like technical problems, it turns out to be the administrative issues that turn out to be really the much more difficult kind of things. It's easier to get a computer to do something than a person.
JB: Um-hum, that's true, right?
HS: We think that's true! I'm pretty sure that's true.
JB: Well, we always keep coming back to the policy issues and also the fact that people just have to do an awful lot of learning. That came up earlier today, too, I think, when you were talking about getting the students on at ASU, getting all the students on Exchange, you know. That's a tremendous conceptual -- it is a shift for people and that takes time.
NW: Yeah, it takes training money to have -- for staff, a considerable investment by an IT organization.
JB: Okay. Anyone have a final comment they'd like to add to our transcript here? This will be the last session until fall so this is really a wrap-up.
NW: Well, I'd like to thank you for having me!
JB: Okay.
RW: And it's been my pleasure!
HS: Good! It's been great to have both of you work on this with us, to electronically collaborate with us. It's kind of interesting, actually, to do a talk about something that we're doing.
JB: It is fun, just like we did it at the session we did at Blackboard, Howard.
Okay, well, let me go ahead and say our closing notes here. I'd like to invite everyone to set aside time on their fall calendar for the Fall 2000 series. We're sorry that we won't be here for the summer, but we will be busy identifying topics and experts for starting in the fall. We're asking, if you do have nominations for either topics or experts, to please send them in to cren@cren.net. And it's easy to do from our homepage as well.
Many thanks to everyone who supports these TechTalks and thanks to everyone who helped to make this event possible today, and especially our corporate sponsor, Microsoft. Be sure to look at their special offer on the web page. A special thanks also goes to our guest experts, Randy Wiemer and Nate Wilken; to our technology anchor, Howard Strauss; to Terry Calhoun, event page producer; to David Smith and Patty Gaul of CREN; to Julia O'Brien, Jason Russell, Gayle Terkeurst and the whole support team at the Merit Network; to Susie Berneis, audio file transcriber; to Laurel Erickson, transcript editor and indexer; and finally, a thanks to all of you for the questions and for being here. You were here because it's time.
Bye, Randy, Nate, Howard and everyone. See you on the web.
HS: Bye, see you in the fall!
JB: All right, bye-bye.
RW: Bye.
NW: Bye.
