General A1 maintenance and account transfers required a significant amount of Tim Mee’s time during the year, most especially around fiscal and calendar year-end when the majority of the transfers take place. Tim invested significant effort to reduce the amount of bounced and/or undeliverable mail. He also worked on configurations to reduce SMTP looping problems resulting from listserv traffic to closed accounts. Spamming continues to be a problem, and can be expected to impact the new e-mail system as well, requiring e-mail administrator and security administrator effort to manage.

During the year, Tim worked on evaluation of existing software for Y2K compliance as well as potential A-1 replacements such as GroupWise and Netscape. Jnet was retired due to Y2K issues, creating extra effort for the SIS and other legacy programmers who used Jnet protocols in their applications. The server team was successful in testing Netscape calendar server which provides for individual and group calendars as well as the ability to synchronize with Palm Pilot users.

In August 1998, it was established that the current version was not Y2K ready. After attempts to obtain the source code with the possibility of doing the Y2K mods in-house and extensive research into various options, a team met in December to discuss the essential features of a replacement e-mail system, and determined that an "open standards" system would best fit Maricopa’s needs. The team felt strongly that there was adequate time to put out an RFP and that the value of the RFP process would override any complexities created by the impact on the schedule.

KC Hundere took the lead role, and invested six months in the RFP selection process. The new e-mail system will use clients such as Netscape Communicator, and will support binary attachments such as Microsoft Word files. In addition to extensive hardware and software issues, the new system will demand the implementation of enterprise-wide directory services and extensive user training. Both the directory services and the training will require either strong leadership or extensive time for collaboration and discussion. This project has many opportunities to positively impact Maricopa, but the road to implementation is slippery and hazardous. More information about e-mail at Maricopa during the 1998-1999 fiscal year is available. The E-Mail project also has a website.