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The Dallas County Community College District (DCCCD) consists of seven campuses across Dallas County, Texas. There are about 46,000 credit-seeking students in the system, in addition to a similar number of continuing education students. Because of the vast turnover in student population, administrators needed a way to make e-mail available to the student population without requiring a major network reconfiguration each semester.

Seven junior-level college campuses, a center or economic development and business incubation, a center for educational telecommunications, and two administrative offices comprise the DCCCD. There are about 4,000 computers in the educational network and 3,000 computers in the administrative network.

Jorge Ayala, the student e-mail postmaster and network support specialist for DCCCD, explained the college's needs: "Last May, we were presented with the challenge of providing e-mail for our credit students. Previously, e-mail had been available on a limited basis on some of our campuses. We estimated that up to 35% of our population would require this service; the other 65% would already have an e-mail address or would not be interested in this service."

The first stage of the project entailed implementing the service at three of the seven campuses and having it tested in time for the 1997 fall semester.

"Our goal was to find an e-mail system that was easy to use, portable, simple to integrate into our network, easy to administer and support, and affordable since the students would not be required to pay additional fees for this service," says Ayala. E-mail needed to be accessible from work or home, as well as from any of the computers available for student use at the colleges.

Scalability was another important consideration. With an increasing number of students and phased implemented plan, the college needed a flexible and expandable system that could serve the first three campuses and add a number of mailboxes to serve the remaining four campuses as they were brought online.

"We couldn't find any one product that met our needs, so we decided on a combination of products: Netscape Messaging and Directory Servers for administration and mail hosting, and Infinite Technologies' WebMail for the client interface," says Ayala.

The Netscape servers give IS personnel the flexibility to add and delete accounts each semester. This is important since many students only enroll for one semester. The college can add capacity as the number of e-mail accounts increases.

The Netscape Directory Server serves as the security manager for the mail accounts and allows DCCCD to offer Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) searches for e-mail addresses. The Directory Server LDAP database includes the e-mail addresses for faculty and staff, who use GroupWise for e-mail. Students can search for the e-mail addresses of their instructors or fellow students, regardless of which e-mail system they use.

"WebMail provides a Web-based e-mail interface that easily integrates with our legacy e-mail systems," Ayala says. Students can use any workstation with Internet access and a Web browser to check their e-mail without any special setup or configuration. Students can go from computer to computer inside a specific lab, to a different lab on campus, to a different campus, or to their office or home, and still have access to their e-mail.

Although the new system can interface with many e-mail systems such as cc:Mail, Microsoft Exchange, and IMAP4, as well as be a standalone e-mail system, DCCCD chose to use the IMAP interface because its student population is highly nomadic. Since the IMAP technology was designed with the nomadic user in mind, all e-mail messages are stored on a centralized server and are accessible from anywhere with the e-mail client.

Ayala says the system was easy to integrate into the existing network infrastructure. "And it sports many other useful features for DCCCD users," he says. "Students can personalize the look and feel. Folders can be created and synchronized with the IMAP server. There is a spell-checking feature that gives students the ability to add custom words to their own dictionary, and there is message attachment support.

"We have been able to provide a more reliable and user-friendly messaging environment," Ayala says.