These days many people are carrying iPhones, Blackberrys and other sorts of smart phones capable of surfing the web and sending/receiving email and this includes employees of the school district. The school district email software is Groupwise from Novell which supports the two primary email communication protocols, commonly known as “POP” and “IMAP”.
POP or Post-Office Protocol is a one-way communication path. A device asks for data and pulls it from the mail servers. The only option left up the user is whether to leave a copy of the email message on the mail server or remove it. Other than that, any message read using POP will have no impact on the message left on the server. If you read a message from a device and then connect to the server directly the user will see that same message marked as “unread”.
IMAP or Internet Message Access Protocol is a two-way communication path. Unlike with POP, devices “talk back” to the mail server and sync any changes automatically with IMAP. If you read a message from a device and then connect to the server directly the user will see that same message marked as “read”. If you move a message to a folder from a device that message will appear in the folder when the user connects directly to the mail server. This all happens automatically once IMAP is set up, so you don’t have to read or sort all your mail twice.
Novell Groupwise comes with POP and IMAP capability already built in, all that is needed is the IT administrator to check a box in the settings to switch it on.
Even though the the District has long ago licensed software with a built-in email capability which will allow any employee with a smart phone who wishes to send and receive email wherever and whenever they choose, the Director of IT Christine Coleman, has, so far, refused to check the settings box in Novell Groupwise that will enable this feature.
Her reason? None. All she will say is that her department “does not support IMAP or POP”. What does that mean? It is an IT department’s way of saying “we do not want to do anything that MIGHT cause us to have to do any “extra” work”. The fear being that if they allow employees to access email on their phones some of them might call asking for help. Of course, the IT department can direct any such employee back to the phone company that sold the telephone since each phone comes with free tech support for help with precisely this sort of thing. All the IT department needs to do is enable POP or IMAP, provide a web page with the required settings and a message stating that each phone is different, that the district does not offer tech support for setting up email on phones and that the employee should contact their provider if they need assistance setting up the phone. As best I can tell this is will take less than 5 minutes.
Hmmm. Let’s see, give any employee who wants it access to their email on their phone, it’s free, and it requires virtually no effort on the part of the IT department. Sounds like a terrible idea, right? Wrong. This is a no brainer. If the administration is not going to enable IMAP or POP then the board should order them to do so…immediately. Come on people, it is almost 2010! Millions and millions of people have bought smart phones and more and more people intend to when their current contract expires.
Unable to justify not offering this capability, rest assured Christine Coleman will rely on her old standby – scare tactics. It is easy to scare people about technology like Schools Superintendent Richard Organisciak and most members of the school board because they are self-admitted technical luddites who are largely befuddled by computing technology. Coleman is very good at making up frightening scenarios in order to advance her do-nothing agenda. Of course, every “scary” scenario she can dream up will apply equally to a cell phone and a personal computer. And guess what? The district already allows district employees to access Novell Groupwise via their personal computers and home (or any computer on the Internet for that matter). If the district has already decided to allow employees to have access to their emails even when they are not directly connected to the district’s computer network (and they have) then what is the difference between access on a personal computer and a cell phone? In fact, any smart phone with a web browser and access to the Internet can access Groupwise right now. The only difference is that smart phones include email software that makes it easier to read, manage and response to email as opposed to using a web browser.
As for the question, POP or IMAP? That is a no brainer too – as this article makes clear. Read the whole thing but here is a quick summary of benefits of IMAP.
1. Avoid webmail outages
2. Switch clients or platforms painlessly
3. Read all your mail on multiple devices
4. Keep an extra copy of your messages