Development

The development function is concerned with designing, developing and managing the implementation of changes to the technical and administrative infrastructure of the institutional electronic mail service, in order to expand and enhance the service capabilities over time.

Areas that will require development include:

Technical Infrastructure

As the volume of clients, administrators and traffic increases over time, changes to the technical infrastructure will be required to support the expanding demand. As the technology used within the electronic mail service system ages, and new capabilities come into the market, changes to the technical infrastructure will be required to support the demand for additional features. The technical infrastructure development function would monitor the expansion of demand, and evolution of marketplace function, and develop and manage the deployment of the required changes to the technical and administrative infrastructure.

Network Infrastructure

Concomitant with the development of the electronic mail service system and service agents, intense development will need to proceed in the area of the network layer infrastructure, in order to expand the number of data connections and types of access methods available to the client. Some specific development activities are discussed further in section .

Policy

Policies will be required on a wide variety of issues within the institutional electronic mail service, on an ongoing an evolving basis. A policy development function will need to exist to gather consensus, develop, update, and electronically distribute policy statements to the appropriate clients and administrators. Issues such as:

• host naming
• domain naming
• appropriate use of electronic mail
• confidentiality
• access rights
• appropriate use of directory information
• training
• instructional use
• software copying rights

and many other areas will require policy statements to guide users and administrators in their use of the institutional electronic mail service. These policy statements should be provided online and accessible via the network.