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Neo users may notice that their Neo accounts are moving at an increasingly slower speed. But as of 8 a.m. Saturday, Neo will become TAMU Email after Texas A&M upgrades the e-mail system. It will be applicable to more services found online, which can handle a wide variety of tasks that have been requested by A&M students in previous years.
Chris Sansom, class of 1999, is the senior lead information technology consultant on the project and the consultant on user services for the transition to TAMU Email system.
"For the past year it's been obvious Neo needs to be updated, and it's not a trivial process. For the past eight years [Neo has] been monolithic. Lots of people use it every day. We've been working on [a replacement e-mail system] for about a year," he said. "Late last semester, the vendor we had been working with decided they were not going to support the product we were upgrading to, so we had to make a quick decision on how to proceed, and that's how we ended up here."
He pointed out that Neo is named for the server it's based on, a server nearly as old as the first "Matrix" movie. Sansom said that for the past few days, Neo has been "nearly unusable," which is a major reason the e-mail service upgrade is being done in such a rush.
"From the costumer standpoint, [we must tell them] how are they going to be affected, what changes they are going to have to go through, what will they have to do on their side," said Allison Oslund, the communications manager for Computer Information Services. "Get them really excited and to realize this is a massive, massive undertaking. Millions of e-mails moved from one server to another - six terabytes of data, an extraordinary number.
"There is going to be an outage for 12 hours with no Neo at all. There will be some slight hiccups to deal with when the new system comes on, but I think the end result will be much easier to use and a lot more functionality, very comparable to Gmail."
TAMU Email comes with many features typical of e-mail systems. Including auto-complete when typing an e-mail address already in the user's address book, spell check and the ability to access other e-mail accounts.
"I use this interface to check my Groupwise e-mail," Sansom said. "Say you have a Gmail or a departmental account. You can add those and do what's called IMAP, where you connect to the server with this interface and read your mail. When I connect with this interface to Groupwise to read my mail, it will let me see my messages, my calendar entrees and everything."
Sansom said the search feature is "especially cool." He showed that the search can be formatted to search for whatever is desired. Calendars, e-mails and certain folders and can search the entire text of attachments to e-mails for the search term. Any search that is frequently used can be stored so that the user can save time.
"There are many more features we didn't have time to implement yet, but they will be very, very cool in the future," Oslund said. "The [features implemented are] ones students have asked for for years, [those] that people really need and really want. All the things that will make e-mail easier to use. People will be looking forward to using what they have now at TAMU Email. It will be a whole different experience."
Sansom said that the launch is expected to go smoothly, but did remark that there is always a risk in changing software.
"TAMU Email was made on the latest, greatest system, so it has the latest, greatest bugs," he said.
Oslund said the staff planned the outage at a time that they reasoned the fewest students would be online trying to use their e-mail.
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