Moving to Exchange: Censorship at Oklahoma State University?

HCL Domino Domino Forum
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START RANT/SOAPBOX

As some of you may or may not know, Oklahoma State University is now in the process of migrating 35,000+ user from Notes to Exchange, citing that Notes/Domino had a 3-400% higher TCO than Exchange.

OSU has a public discussion forum related to this migration, which apparently is being made for Political and not cost reasons (that bear any semblance to reality).

On the OSU forum, it does not state ANYWHERE that the forum was restricted to OSU associated people anywhere and in fact it was not secured behind any sort of firewall and had no security restrictions applied.

As such, there were a number of people who posted questions and opinions on the migration and these postings have NOW been deleted. (And I have screen shots of the posts so they cannot say this is so).

There is nothing that gets my dander up more than censorship of free speech, particularly at a publicly funded institution.

In my mind, these deletions:

  1. Are a form of censorship of free expression;

  2. The possible destruction of what should be considered official documents/records; and

  3. Inadequate security/application design (well it is built with PhP/mySQL) by the person brought in from the outside and charged by the President of OSU to make the change happen (both came to OSU from Texas Tech at the same time).

  4. We all know these decisions often happen at the personal whims of a “C” level person, but should there not be more accountability to taxpayers at a publicly funded institution?

This is the end of my rant.soapbox? what do you all think?

Here are some threads/links:

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nd6forum.nsf/DateAllThreadedweb/d4a645fa911ba53185256e71005a7692?OpenDocument

http://www-10.lotus.com/ldd/nd6forum.nsf/55c38d716d632d9b8525689b005ba1c0/4a7ee6acdd62c36a85256e7100715673?OpenDocument

https://app.it.okstate.edu/phpBB2/index.php

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Subject: Moving to Exchange: Censorship at Oklahoma State University?

I don’t know if it amounts to criminal suppression of free speech, but it definately makes them look foolish.

If your only defense in a debate is to tell the opposing side to shutup, maybe you should rethink your position.

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Subject: Moving to Exchange: Censorship at Oklahoma State University?

Reluctantly, I mostly disagree. For your first point, I’m not entirely certain what the intended purpose of those discussion fora is, but I can’t bring myself to regard an organization not permitting non-members (who could not be disciplined for, say, posting offensive or legally actionable material) to participate in its own discussion boards as a clear-cut violation of First Amendment rights. Consider this from an admin’s point of view: you’re running a board which is most likely there to facilitate internal discussion of your system and diseminate information. Locking out outsiders is good practice. There’s arguably not just a right but an actual duty here.

For your second point, although I’m no expert, I can’t imagine that there’s any kind of requirement that everything that comes across the message boards must be saved, much less publically displayed. Again, from the admin’s point of view, he’s pruning noise from signal. Extensive arguments from people who are only slightly, if at all, connected to the organization about keeping Notes once the decision to move to Exchange has been made are ipso facto off topic.

For point #3…well, can’t disagree with you there.

For point #4, how do we know there’s no accountability or other investigation going on here? Presumably, the guy making the decision presented his case to the people in charge of writing checks, who were sufficiently swayed by whatever information he presented to give him the thumbs up. Were they presented with bad information? Probably, but given that countless organizations use Exchange and Outlook without spontaneously bursting into flames, it’s not, to non-technical eyes (and, yes, to many technical people as well), an obvious wrong move. It happens to be one that we both disagree with, but I can’t ignore my own partisanship here, either. We both know as absolute fact that the wrong decision was made. By the same token, my devoutly Protestant mother-in-law knows as absolute fact that my Catholic grandmother-in-law is going to Hell and vice versa.

So is all of this the result of a fundamentally bad decision made by someone working with either wildly inaccurate information or a deeply held personal prejudice? Yes. Clumsily handled? Yes. A violation of a public trust or of fundamental rights? I think it falls well short of that. The true cause of anger here, it seems to me, is that we lost one, as we do from time to time. If it works out for them, then we’re ultimately wrong about it. If it doesn’t, we’ll clap our hands with glee when they come back.

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Subject: RE: Moving to Exchange: Censorship at Oklahoma State University?

First, was that your ND6 book I saw at Borders last night?

Now back to discussion. From my experience in Government (12+ years), any form of communication (electronic or written) is considered a record and has to be treated as such until a determination has been made by a designated official of the organization in question. Willful destruction before a determination has been made is a BAAAD thing.

Second, but not posting acceptable use policies or closing discussions to outsiders demonstrates inadequate attention being paid to application security, access and acceptable use belies a fundamental fault in their IT Infrastructure and they would fail to pbtain ISO 9001:2000 certification if they were so inclined.

The post he removed was one where HE (the admin) stated that the reason for the move was the supposed TCO issue. As he wrote it as a university official, it is by default a public record because he made this statement in a public forum hosted by the University, using his official title. He also appears to have deleted postings by University Employees/contractors.

This goes beyond clumsy and hides accountability. When it comes to public finds and procurement decisions, appearance is reality.

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Subject: RE: Moving to Exchange: Censorship at Oklahoma State University?

First, was that your ND6 book I saw at Borders last night?

Could have been. I wrote part of a ND6 book and all of one and parts of other R5 books.

I’ve spent next to no time dealing with government, so I’m sure that you’ve got a far better handle than I on what should and should not be done. That said, I’ve spent a certain amount of time in universities and university computing (long academic career, former employee of a university computing facility, child of a former professor/current dean at a large university and a university sysadmin), and I must say that the idea of any of the places I’ve seen or worked at getting ISO 9001 certified is deeply amusing.

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Subject: RE: Moving to Exchange: Censorship at Oklahoma State University?

Thought you might chuckle at the ISO thing:-)

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Subject: Moving to Exchange: Censorship at Oklahoma State University?

FS, I’m not going to comment on the public policy or legal issues, as I’m certainly not qualified to do so.

From an ethical standpoint, however, what is in evidence here is the same dynamic that is in effect in so many other IT shops - and not just regarding migrations to Microsoft. Rather, it’s epidemic that decisions regarding the implementation of technologies (and by extension the commitment of significant organizational resources) are based not on thorough, objective analysis and impartial judgment, but rather on partial or clearly wrong information, personal biases, and flat out incompetence and arrogance.

As someone who has worked within and with a fairly large number of IT organizations over the last few years, I’ve seen this phenomenon over and over again. IT Directors, CIO’s, and other folks far removed from the trenches hear a slick sales pitch and decide in an instant (these are decisive, action-oriented folks, right? uggggh) that their organization had better get on board. Presto, chango, major technology shift is imposed upon a helpless organization that needed no such event to occur.

Or you have the organization where the IT “professionals” feel an emotional attachment or comfort zone to a particular technology and refuse to acknowledge or consider that another technological solution might be more appropriate to that organization. Again, incompetence, arrogance and organizational paranoia and inertia commits an organization to a shaky path.

Once upon a time, it was said that you couldn’t get fired if you bought IBM. Now it’s said that you can’t get fired by going Microsoft. In my opinion, a professional IT director/manager shouldn’t feel allegiance to ANY particular technology and should always be willing to consider whether his organization’s technological choices are positioned to accomplish the larger organization’s goals (instead of his or her own personal desire for aggrandizement, job protection, etc.)

Oh, and as an aside, as far as I’m concerned, TCO is the most useless, abused and wrongheaded selling point around. It’s impossible to verify, even more impossible to accurately compare and totally worthless to attempt to use ANY (including IBM, for what it’s worth) vendor’s TCO figures to any real organizational situation. Fixed costs are thrown in with variable costs, other assumptions thrown in willy-nilly, unrealistic paybacks factored in. It’s all B.S. as far as I can tell. Of course, since TCO can’t be independently verified, it’s a wonderful selling tool to pose to suckers already biased toward your product who have neither the intellectual curiosity nor professional discipline to investigate further.

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Subject: on the slick sales pitch…

…software packages sold an bought like that are called ‘golf course software’ here - because that’s where the selling, evaluating and buying usually is done :slight_smile:

But seriously, you’re right. I’ve seen situations where the IT dept strongly adviced against buying package this or that, but the CxO went ahead just the same, for reasons uncomprehensible to anyone with actual technical knowledge or responsibility.

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Subject: Moving to Exchange: Censorship at Oklahoma State University?

I see your points, but respectfully disagree.If I put a forum ‘out there’, and people say things that I do not like, that is their right. But as the owner of the forum, it is my right to shut it down, delete things, or do whatever I wish. You can think less of me for doing so, but it is my right.

I disagree that just because it was a public institution, those rights of theirs are limited. Quite the opposite, actually. It is their forum, therefore, their communication. The fact that you participated in it does not convert the forum as a whole to something that you communicated. Therefore, their free speech allows them to do whatever they want with it.

I am sure you disagree, but to each his own. :slight_smile: