The VT IM Pilot began over two years ago with the following objectives: provide a secure mechanism for real-time enterprise communication, offer presence awareness, stimulate online collaboration, and serve as an alternative to e-mail communications. The pilot has met these objectives and has proven to be quite a success. Today the service has nearly 400 registered users and averages around 100 simultaneous users throughout the day. The time has come to take this project to the next level and make it a production service.
The new production IM service is already in place and I would like to start migrating pilot users over to it. The service is available for use at im.vt.edu. It is running on new hardware with the latest software releases and the Virginia Tech SSL certificate has been replaced with one issued by a commercial vendor in order to get around trust and incompatibility issues with some clients. Roster (a.k.a. buddy list), conference room membership, and conference room history information was copied from the pilot over to production last week so everything is relatively current. To access the service, all you need to do is change the login on your IM client from <pid>@im.iad.vt.edu to <pid>@im.vt.edu. You should get right in and see all your existing data from the pilot.
I would like to take the pilot offline The pilot will be going offline on August 1, 2007. This gives us gives everyone three weeks to make the transition. I will start sending warning messages Warning messages will start being sent through the pilot service on July 23, 2007. I will then send one final One final mass e-mail to users prior pilot participants will be issued prior to taking the pilot down.
Please let me know if If you run into any problems with the new service, or if you have any questions or concerns. I should be signed onto both systems so feel free to message me, please contact Ken McCrery.