Agenda - 01-24-2006 - 9d - Laserfiche WebLink

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While the service can typically be restored within 30 minutes, this level of unavailability has caused significant problems for the public and staff. These outages result in delayed delivery and receipt of critical communications and an overall inability of staff to access email reliably. The County's current email configuration is within all operational norms as recommended by the vendor. All ameliorative actions have been taken in strict accordance with vendor recommended practices. The Information Technology department has escalated these issues within the vendor's support organization and on several occasions, vendor support specialists have been on site to troubleshoot the problems. To date, no consistent fix has been identified. Vendor Situation The Novell Corporation has experienced significant fiscal difficulties in the past 4 years, Their revenues have fallen and they have resorted to a series of layoffs to try and turn the company around. There is much industry speculation that Novell will sell-off certain product lines in order to focus on what they consider their core competency, in this case networking. GroupWise, their email product, is frequently discussed as a candidate for such "fiscal streamlining." Usually, such sell-offs are for market share rather than technology and typically leave remaining customers facing a complex conversion under time duress. In support of the speculation of Novell's commitment to their email product, recent GroupWise releases have been significantly problematic, while the responsiveness of their support organization has been notably deficient. These findings, while anecdotal, are typical of a technology firm in fiscal duress. While speculation on a vendor's future performance is far from certain, waiting for certainty could well find Orange County having to change vendors in a constrained timeframe. It appears Novell is positioned to make a drastic technology change in order to salvage its fortunes, While the success of this strategy is purely speculative, for Orange County to follow Novell's drastic technology changes would require significant changes in our hardware, networking infrastructure and staff composition. Without an option to remain in our current situation, it is prudent to examine broader options. Networking Changes In addition to our reliance on Novell for our email system, we use their networking product, Netware as the primary mechanism by which we interconnect servers and desktop computers. While this product continues to be reliable, we are finding more and more of our application vendors are migrating away from Netware and embracing more ubiquitous networking systems, most notably Microsoft's Active Directory. Given the inter-reliance of email and networking systems, we need to plan on changing both in any email migration project. By adopting a networking system that has a broad market share, Orange County will have far more options in selecting applications and in implementing efficiencies in managing the County network. Proposed New Solution Orange County Information Technology, with advisement from the Orange County Information Technology Advisory Committee, proposes a replacement of Novell GroupWise and Netware with Microsoft products, notably Exchange/Outlook and Active Directory. The proliferation of these products throughout local government and industry has established them as a clear