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Special delivery: Migrating to multimedia electronic mail

By Chris Shull and Noam Arzt

Many people at Penn and elsewhere have found electronic mail to be an indispensable communications medium. Faculty, students, and staff alike use e-mail daily for scholarship, administration, and communication with colleagues at the University and around the world. And, although numerous e-mail systems are in use at Penn -- Elm, ALL-IN-1, VAXmail, UNIX mail, Eudora, Pegasus, and others -- all conform to an Internet standard that ensures reliable delivery and display of simple text messages.

More problematic, however, is use of multimedia e-mail to exchange spreadsheets, formatted documents, graphics, and the like, a capability that is increasingly in demand. If multimedia formats could be attached to e-mail messages, then e-mail would be the ideal way to coauthor articles, cooperate on projects, and reduce paper shuffling. Unfortunately, automatically attached documents usually do not transfer properly unless correspondents are using the same e-mail product. Even then, a series of laborious and difficult-to-follow steps is often required to transfer, encode, and attach a document to an e-mail message -- steps which the recipient must reverse at the other end.

Fortunately, standards and products are emerging that promise interoperation between multimedia mail systems and desktops. Unfortunately, substantial investment -- in desktop computer and network hardware, software, training, and support -- will be required to participate, once standards have been adopted and product claims tested in the laboratory and marketplace.

How can we best bring the benefits of these emerging technologies to all members of the Penn community? Planning and promoting Penn's migration from current electronic messaging systems to the next generation of functionally superior systems is the challenge facing the Office Systems Working Group of the Electronic Mail Task Force. Also in the charter of this group are enhancing online directory services, addressing workgroup calendering needs, and supporting electronic filing and records management.

Working towards solutions

Toward these ends, the working group has published a 70-page draft for comment entitled "Penn Office Systems: Planning a New Architecture for Personal and Workgroup Productivity Systems" and an 8-page "Executive Summary." The draft for comment describes a vision for Penn's office systems consistent with the University's academic missions and the administrative computing goals of Project Cornerstone, detailing desired functions and environmental requirements and a process for working toward that vision.

While the working group has broad representation from many schools and administrative units, the first step of the process entails a "sanity check" of the vision with interested groups at Penn. (Please see the sidebar below if you want to obtain copies of the documents.) At the same time, the working group is establishing priorities among the functions and environmental requirements for these new products and learning about people's experiences with software already in use.

In meetings with campus constituents the working group has decided to focus this calendar year on the following functional areas detailed in the draft.

• Sending and receiving text messages on and off campus
• Transmitting word processor documents, spreadsheets, etc., simply and without losing formatting or formulae
• Maintaining and enhancing the campus-wide directory service for the electronic addresses of people and organizations

In 1995, the working group expects to begin work on functional areas of lower priority

• Addressing workgroup needs to schedule meetings and share calendars
• Supporting electronic filing and records management

Challenges ahead

There are two important implementation challenges that the campus community needs to be aware of as the working group moves ahead. First, users will require graphical user interfaces to make fullest use of the new products and the richer functionality. This requirement has led the working group to restrict its examination of products to those that will run under MS-Windows 3.1, Macintosh System 7, and UNIX/X-Windows.

Second, users will require desktop computers and network connections capable of running these windowing environments well in order to use this new generation of e-mail products (e.g., at minimum an Intel 80386 for Windows, Motorola 68030 for Macintosh, and RISC processors for UNIX -- all with full function network connections, such as Ethernet). Older desktop computers running older operating systems with older asynchronous network connections may have e-mail software consistent with campus standards for some (short) time in the future, but these platforms will be significantly restricted in the advanced features that they will support. While the cost of upgrades is considerable for some organizations, the same upgrades are already being planned to meet academic and administrative computing requirements.

Current e-mail products will continue to meet many communications needs today; the working group expects the widespread deployment of advanced e-mail to take about two years.

If you would like to participate in the efforts of the Office Systems Working Group, please contact Chris Shull, shull@isc.upenn.edu or 898-5930, or Noam Arzt, arzt@dccs.upenn.edu or 898-3029.

Sidebar: E-mail Task Force documents available

The draft for comment, "Penn Office Systems: Planning a New Architecture for Personal and Workgroup Productivity Systems," and an 8-page " Executive Summary" are available in PostScript format on ftp.upenn.edu in the directory /pub/doc.

Printed copies are available from Ted Fry, Suite 221A, 3401 Walnut Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, 898-1787 or fryt@pobox.upenn.edu.