UW Exchange Service Description

Summary: This page provides an overview of the current features and support environment for UW Exchange.

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This document is in reference to UW Exchange Release 1. Future releases may result in feature changes.

Service Overview

UW Exchange provides integrated services for email, calendaring, contact management and task management.

Users of UW Exchange can send and receive email, schedule meetings with other UW Exchange users, reserve resource calendars, manage personal contacts, and manage personal tasks, all through one client program. UW Exchange also provides collaborative features, including the ability to share mail folders, calendars, contacts and tasks with other users.

UW Exchange is offered by UW Technology Services to current faculty and staff of the University of Washington.

Supported Features (Release 1)

Unsupported Features (Release 1)

• Group management: UW Exchange does not currently support defining and delegating administration of groups of users for the purpose of granting access to shared resources. Work is under way to solve this need.
• Exchange-based Distribution Lists: UW Exchange does not currently support the use of Distribution Lists. The UW Mailman service may be used to meet this need.
• Public Folder item restoration: The public folder data store is backed up as a whole for disaster recovery purposes only. Therefore, UW Exchange currently does not support item-level or folder-level public folder restoration.

Quota and message size limits

The standard mailbox size is 2 gigabytes. The maximum message size is 60 megabytes.

Service Support and Contact

UW Exchange is provided to customers under the assumption that:

• Departments will provide any required client hardware and software, including client CALs and client software, necessary for their users to utilize UW Exchange.
• Departmental technical staff will provide end user migration and technical support. Support inquiries from end users should be directed to the designated departmental support organization for UW Exchange.
• Departmental technical staff and UW Technology Services staff will cooperate to resolve issues in the most expeditious manner possible.

If support inquiries require escalation to UW Technology Services, such questions should be sent via email to help@u.washington.edu.

UW Technology Services service center phone support is available at 206-221-5000. The service center is staffed Monday-Friday from 8:00 am to 8:00 pm local time, and Sunday from 1:00 pm to 8:00 pm local time. The service center is closed Saturday. During hours when the service center is closed, there are escalation processes in place for outage notification to on-call staff. Some support inquiries will require referral from the service center to staff who are available only during university business hours.

Service Charges and Fees

UW Exchange is funded on a fee-based, cost-recovery basis. The fees for Exchange are:

• $8 per user mailbox per month. Standard mailbox size is 2 gigabytes.
• $3 per resource account per month. Resource accounts are for conference rooms, equipment, and other resources. Resource accounts allow the resources to be scheduled using the Exchange calendar.
• Blackberry users are charged for licensing fee recovery and ongoing support.

Customers considering UW Exchange should note that additional licensing fees may be required. Access to UW Exchange requires an Exchange Server 2007 Enterprise Client Access License as well as the Exchange Server 2007 Standard Client Access License. Either the Microsoft Campus Agreement or the Microsoft Select Agreement may be used for volume license purchasing of these licenses.

Service Standards

UW Exchange is targeted as an always-available service with minimal downtime. Systems are monitored 7 days per week, 24 hours per day for disruptions and on-call staff are available for outage resolution. Scheduled maintenance, when required, is performed during published maintenance windows. Currently this is set to be between 11:00 pm Wednesday and 3:00 am Thursday each week.

Backup and Retention

All mailboxes are backed up nightly. Full backups are done on a weekly basis, with daily incremental backup. Therefore, mailbox backups are retained for 7 days. Backup tapes are vaulted off-site in two distinct geographic regions and seismic zones.

UW Exchange has enabled a feature that can preserve deleted items for 7 days in case of a need for user recovery. So, it is possible that some data in such a state could be recovered up to 14 days from its deletion.

Exceptional circumstances

While every effort has been made to limit downtime of UW Exchange, unplanned events may result in unexpected service outages. UW Exchange is designed with two recovery targets: Service Restoration (in which the ability to send and receive mail is restored) and Content Restoration (in which mailbox content is restored to the state of the last successful backup prior to the disruption).

UW Exchange maintains recovery procedures to limit the duration required for service restoration for most scenarios to 48 hours or less.

UW Exchange maintains recovery procedures to limit the duration required for content restoration for most scenarios to not exceed 2 weeks.