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patrickbParticipant
Again, though, I think Darrell is getting to a key point that remains unaddressed. Different departments have radically different needs, and trying to mandate that they all use the same service despite this difference is either going to make providing a unified service infeasible (because it’s trying to do too many things for too many people), or seriously impede some departments’ abilities to do their job. There’s a fundamental tension between efficiency and flexibility in any discussion of centralized (“enterprise”) vs. distributed services, and that trade-off needs to be explicitly recognized and managed, not brushed under the rug.
patrickbParticipantFundamentally, designating a service as “enterprise” forbids academic units from doing what they want in an area, even if the unit would meets the University’s legal obligations. For example, many of my colleagues are fundamentally opposed to using a Microsoft-provided email server for a variety of reasons (distrust of Microsoft based on a long history of research in teh area being not the least of these.) Telling faculty that they must use the Microsoft-provided server and cannot setup and maintain a departmental server, even if it meets UNM’s legal obligations is very problematic. That strikes at the very foundation of academic freedom.
The problems are even more severe for those of who research and teach in computing, where designating a service as “enterprise” specifically impedes our ability to research and teach as we feel is most appropriate. “Enterprise services” explicitly limit our ability to do so. As just two examples, students creating simple SMTP (mail) servers makes a very good introductory computer neworking assignment, because of the simplicity of the protocol. Likewise, SMTP servers make very good honeypots for computer security teaching and research; the “enterprise” designation significantly impacts our academic freedom to conduct research in this way.
patrickbParticipantFinally, please remember that there are important academic freedom issues that arise with proposals to limit what faculty, departments, and units are allowed to do beyond our legal obligations. I haven’t seen any consideration of that mentioned in this process at all, and several faculty in my department have expressed their concerns about this to me.
patrickbParticipantI had already started a thread on setting up an exception process here; no one from IT has responded in it, however. I’m happy to provide feedback as appropriate to try to help the services being proposed better meet our needs so that we could potentially move people to IT-provided services; that said, most of my comments in those places have gone unanswered for a week or more. Moreover, some of the services demands of some of the departments in some areas (e.g. network management, IP address assignment, email, etc.) are *far* beyond what is being proposed so I’m not sure how productive some of my feedback would be.
- This reply was modified 8 years, 1 month ago by patrickb.
patrickbParticipantThe issue I’m trying to get to is that UNM is proposing certain services as “enterprise services” which can only be provided by UNM IT. Some units need a way to request an exception from that policy, but no such process exists that I can se, though I’ve been told there will be an exception process.
patrickbParticipantIs there an expected service time for the creation of NetIDs, particularly for guests? The current long time to create NetIDs for guests, colleagues, and collaborators has been a major impediment w.r.t. wireless network access; I am unclear if that should be addressed as part of this SLA or the wireless networking SLA.
patrickbParticipantCS has found keeping email accounts (or at least a forwarding system) for students who graduated successfully helps preserve relationships with alumni and aids them in professional development. It may be worth considering such a policy for lobomail in general.
patrickbParticipantThe 50GB base email limit may be restrictive for people who have used email for long periods of time (e.g. a number of CS faculty and staff have been archiving email for potentially multiple decades). Having to use multiple archival processes to work around this would be problematic.
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