University Collaboration Suite
Penn State's environment for electronic collaboration provides users with a choice of e-mail and calendaring clients including: Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla's Thunderbird, Mail.app, iCal, and the University Collaboration Suite (UCS) desktop and web based clients. This opportunity to choose, provides our users Operating System independence when working with the collaborative suite. The technology the collaborative suite used to provide this service is VMWare's Zimbra Collaboration Suite (ZCS).
Beginning in 2008, Penn State conducted a series of initiatives to scope and evaluate options for electronic collaboration. Participants represented 17 non-ITS units and ten ITS units. One of the outcomes from those investigations was the recommendation to deploy UCS as a centrally provisioned electronic collaboration system for faculty and staff. We are pleased to share that this recommendation was approved and support has been given for UCS to be deployed as a common good, no-fee service.
Our current centrally provided calendaring service, Oracle Collaboration Suite Calendar (OCS), announced the end-of-life for their software Calendar product, effective for Penn State in October 2011. ITS will purchase maintenance contract extensions as needed to ensure support during the time it takes to migrate all existing Oracle customers to the new system. It is our intention to migrate existing Oracle customers with their involvement by the end of the the first quarter in 2012.
Interested in Joining UCS?
Oracle Collaboration Suite Calendaring Replacement
UCS is the replacement service for all current OCS customers. Once those customers are migrated to the new system, UCS will become available for all Penn State faculty and staff as a common good, no-fee service.
New eCollaboration Clients
Penn State departments and campuses are encouraged to work with your designated ITS Consultant to learn more about this service and determine if it is suitable for your unit. Departments and campuses that currently provide their own Microsoft Exchange service will be pleased to see the integrated level of support offered for migration from Microsoft Exchange as well as support for continued use of the Microsoft Outlook client software.
Additionally, if you are interested in obtaining a training account within the UCS environment, prior to your unit migrating, please contact with your ITS Consultant.
What Can Be Migrated?
Calendar
Customers migrating from Oracle will have their entire calendars moved into UCS, however, there will be some differences in how the information will appear in UCS. During the calendar migration you will, at the very least, have data from two weeks in the past and four weeks in the future. The remainder of your calendar data will be migrated in the hours after the initial migration is complete. Migrated data will appear in your default UCS calendar, named 'Calendar'.
All migrated meetings come in with their status set as 'Private'. This status ONLY matters when you choose to share your calendar with others in UCS. By default, people can only see whether you are free or busy at any given time. If you choose to share your calendar, and the Private setting is checked for an appointment, the sharee will only see the free busy information for the meeting. If you wish for the person you share your calendar with to see more information, you either need to edit individual appointments and uncheck the 'Private' status or when you share your calendar, choose the 'Allow user(s) to see my private appointments' checkbox which will allow the sharee to see full details of any appointment marked as private.
Once all of your Oracle Calendar data is migrated to UCS, we will be taking a few actions on your Oracle Calendar account in order to reduce the chance of someone accidentally inviting you on a system you've been migrated from. You will be marked as uninvitable by anyone in the system. Furthermore, no one in Oracle Calendar will be able to view when you are available in Oracle Calendar. If you wish to undo these actions or take further actions, like adding a Daily Note pointing people at your UCS calendar, you may still log-in to Oracle Calendar and do so.
New UCS customers may opt to have their ITS [e]mail.psu.edu IMAP and/or Penn State WebMail account(s) migrated when their UCS account is created. If a user indicates on the migration form that they are a POP mail user, NO e-mail data will be migrated by ITS for the user. POP mail implies that the user will take on the responsibility of migrating their own e-mail data into UCS.
Tasks
We are currently working on methods to support migrating task items from Oracle Calendaring service into UCS.
Contacts
UCS will integrate with our Penn State Enterprise Directory Service for individual lookups as well as groups defined in our directory. We are also working on methods to support migrating contacts from Oracle Calendaring service into UCS.
When Will Migration Take Place?
Scheduling
Scheduling will be done on a unit-by-unit basis. Please contact your ITS Consultant for an updated schedule.
Additional Information
Training
ITS Training Services will provide both a general overview as well as hands-on training for UCS, first for those migrating from Oracle Calendaring services and then to others looking to take advantage of this new service. A General overview session is available via ITS Adobe Connect located on the ITS Training Services homepage under recordings. In addition, there will be training materials and train-the-trainer opportunities.
Support
The ITS Service Desk will provide full support for UCS. Additional How-To information will be published in the ITS Knowledge Base.
