Through the ITS Self Study process and other anecdotal feedback, it has become a common request for the college to adopt an integrated email/calendaring system for the entire campus. The advantages of this kind of integrated system are already realized in many administrative offices. Group calendaring allows for offices to easily schedule meetings across departments, allow administrative assistants to proxy calendars on behalf of others, and also tightly integrates the sending, receiving, and responding to meeting requests through an email interface. Moving to a joint system for the entire college, including students, staff and faculty would expand these and other functions to a greater audience.

While we have a large number of people who use Groupwise already, without doing a thorough review of the available packages we cannot be sure of which package would best meet the needs of the entire campus. For that reason, ITS has established a workgroup to research and evaluate current systems and then make a recommendation on which package may suit Carleton.

This workgroup has already narrowed the list of potential packages to 4 or 5 of the most likely candidates based on the needs of the college constituencies and technical feasibility in our current infrastructure. What we have discovered is that most of these packages contain most of the known desired features, but differ greatly in how these features are implemented. The only real way of knowing which of these packages would server our community well is by testing each of the final candidate systems in some depth.

We are forming a focus group to help us with this task. More information on this focus group and their activities can be found below.

For more information on this project, see the links below.

(from March 9, 2007)