Title of Service: The Oxford Nexus (Exchange) Service
Status of Document: This is version is 2.1 and is dated 22 February 2013 and describes the Nexus Exchange 2010 service from February 2013.
1. Introduction:
The Oxford Nexus Service provides a suite of software applications to help users work collaboratively within groups. The suite includes: email, online calendar, shared documents, web pages, shared contact lists and other collaboration tools. The Oxford Nexus Service is built on the Microsoft Exchange 2010 and SharePoint 2010 platforms. The Service is available to all staff and students within the collegiate University.
This SLD describes the services available via the Nexus Exchange 2010 implementation. A corresponding SLD (<http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/internal/sld/sharepoint.xml>) describes the services available via the Nexus SharePoint service.
Users are allocated an initial storage quota of 2GB on the Exchange system. This is a 'hard' quota and is further described at <http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/email/quota/>. Users requiring an increase in their quota should contact the OUCS Help Centre in the first instance. You may be asked to justify your request, or to confirm approval from your head of department, IT Support Officer or tutor. A discretionary increase in your quota allowance is unlikely to exceed 3GB. A chargeable 'premium' service is available for those users requiring additional quota in excess of the discretionary allowance. The service is authorised by, and charged to, the unit (department or college) rather than the end-user directly.
As with many services provided by OUCS, support is provided through a combination of OUCS and local IT support (ITSS). As the overall Oxford Nexus Service provider, OUCS may always be contacted by users about any aspect of the service.
The Oxford Nexus SLD indicates the primary user support path for the main elements of the Oxford Nexus Service. Primary support is generally provided by either OUCS or local IT support.
Where primary support is not expected to be provided by OUCS, and is, for example, the user's local ITSS then in many cases ITSS are able to instruct OUCS on behalf of the user. Users will generally be referred to OUCS for secondary support where primary support is provided by local IT support. In all cases, users may contact OUCS in the first instance about any aspect of the Oxford Nexus Service if they so choose. This may, for example, be the most efficient route to resolve most basic problems. In more complex cases OUCS may refer the user to their primary IT support or require the involvement of local IT support in order to resolve the issue.
2. Summary of OUCS’s responsibilities
2.1. Service availability
The service operates at all times.
Oxford Nexus Service systems staff cover is normally available from 0900 to 1700 on working days. Minimal operational cover operates from 0830 to 2030 on working days. Automatic monitoring of the main service elements takes place outside these hours, and informal arrangements exist for staff to be called, but no funding is provided to make this contractual.
The OUCS help desk service currently operates 0830-2030 Monday-Friday all year round except for bank holidays and Christmas closure (approximately 24th December - 2nd January). Please see the OUCS Help Centre SLD for further details of the Help Centre responsibilities, <http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/internal/sld/help.xml>.
If a fault is notified between 0900 and 1700 on a working day, OUCS will commence investigation within one hour (provided that no similar fault is also being handled by the same team).
If a fault is notified outside these hours, OUCS will use reasonable endeavours to rectify the fault, but no funding is allocated to this purpose.
The Oxford Nexus Service hardware is located in two physical locations within the Oxford network. Complete failure at one site should result in failover to the second site with minimal loss of service. Within each site components such as servers and storage have been deployed with resilience and business continuity in mind.
Hardware and Software Maintenance
The hardware on which the Oxford Nexus Service is hosted is supported by maintenance contracts from the relevant vendors.
Software updates are provided by the relevant vendor and applied by OUCS. Where possible the JANET maintenance period (Tuesdays, 0700-0900) will be reserved for maintenance work that may affect service availability. Except in the case of emergency maintenance (e.g. security fixes), scheduled downtime will be advertised at least a week in advance.
Alternative facilities and migrations from local services
Some departments and colleges run their own Exchange or other email service. Where a unit wishes to migrate from their local service to Nexus OUCS will provide advice to departments and colleges on a reasonable efforts basis, including an initial assessment of the complexity and likely resources required to undertake any such migration, as well as providing supporting materials relating to the preferred methods of undertaking any migration process. However, no specific resources have been allocated for OUCS to undertake a migration from a department service to the Nexus Service or for enabling interoperability between Nexus and a local Exchange instance, for example. Departments wishing to migrate from a local service or who wish to use Nexus beyond the scope of the service defined in this SLD would be expected to commit the required resources to enable any OUCS support for such activities (where feasible). The level of support OUCS can provide to migrating units is described at <http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/nexus/itss/altmigrate.xml>. Departments seeking a hosting facility for their own Exchange or email service should contact NSMS in the first instance.
2.2. Administration information and support documentation
Information and support documentation
Support documentation for all aspects of the Oxford Nexus Service is provided online at <http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/nexus/>.
The OUCS IT Learning Programme provides a range of courses relevant to use of the Oxford Nexus Service, <http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/itlp/>.
Notification of major faults, service outage etc are circulated to the itss- announce@maillist.ox.ac.uk mailing list and placed on the OUCS Status website, <http://status.oucs.ox.ac.uk>.
Problems with the Service should be reported to the OUCS Help Centre, <http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/help/>, in the first instance where, if appropriate, the issue will be escalated to the Oxford Nexus Service team for specialist diagnostics and advice.
2.3. Service components
Account management is delegated to OUCS Registration services. The SLD for the Registration Service specifies the list of services offered <http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/internal/sld/registration.xml>. These include, but are not confined to:
- Automated and manual provisioning of Oxford Single Sign-on credentials;
- Automated and manual provisioning of Oxford email address;
- Bulk creation of Single Sign-on and email accounts for new students;
- Issuing of activation and rescue codes for SSO accounts;
- Changes to mail routing;
- Changes to email address;
- Provision of additional department or college email addresses;
- Provision of non-personal accounts and generic email addresses for college or department;
- Discretionary extension of accounts;
- Discretionary increases to mailbox quotas
Registered ITSS may make use of functionality supported by Registration Services to undertake a number of the above actions on behalf of their own users. In particular, ITSS can currently:
- View and set mail routings for their users
- View (but not change) their users' routing for other units
- View and update the routings for generic email addresses
- Issue Activation or Rescue code for SSO accounts of their users
- Request additional chargeable quota on behalf of their users
The following table outlines services or functionality provided to end users through Exchange where OUCS is expected to provide the primary means of support.
| Service | Description | Primary user support |
|---|---|---|
| IMAP, SMTP, POP3, ‘Outlook Anywhere’, Outlook Web Access (incl. OWA lite) | Standard Exchange services provided by the Nexus team. | OUCS |
| Quota usage | Enabling end-users to view quota usage. | OUCS |
| Out of office message | Automated email reply to indicate user away from email. Functionality is enabled/disabled by user. | OUCS |
| Spam scoring and filtering | Scoring of incoming mail via the Oxmails and filtering via Exchange. | OUCS |
| Blacklisting and Whitelisting | Safe senders may be specified by user | OUCS |
| Anti-virus | Virus checking at the Oxmails and at the Exchange servers | OUCS |
| Backup and recovery | The backup service is provided by the HFS Backup and Archiving Service <http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/internal/sld/hfs.xml>. Whole mailbox backups are retained for 90 days, for the purpose of system restores. Users may restore accidentally deleted items up to seven days after the event via the Exchange Deleted Item Recovery. After this period, OUCS operates a chargeable service for the attempted recovery of user deleted items from system backups, <http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/services/recovery.xml>. | OUCS |
| Deleted Items and junk mail retention policy | OUCS purges items in users' Deleted Items and Junk Mail folders after 90 days but items are retained in 'Recover Deleted Items' (sometimes referred to as the "dumpster") for a further 7 days after purging. | OUCS |
| Resource booking | Provision of mailbox accounts to manage room and other resource bookings | OUCS |
| BlackBerry Enterprise Server hosting | Service provided for the benefit of BlackBerry hand held users. | OUCS |
| BlackBerry user creation | Creation of accounts | Provisioned by OUCS under instruction from ITSS |
| BlackBerry server administration | Deletions and suspension of accounts, policy setting, applying user licences. | Provisioned by OUCS under instruction from ITSS |
| BlackBerry support documentation | Primarily the responsibility of OUCS, with departmental/college-specific information (including contractual information) the responsibility of ITSS. | OUCS |
For Exchange client support the first port of call for documentation is the OUCS web site.
Inactive mailbox retention period
The Nexus mailboxes associated with those whose University Card has expired (or status changed so that they are no longer eligible for a Nexus mailbox) are not deleted immediately. The following procedure is followed:
- A default 2 month grace period is permitted, during which time the mailbox remains active and email may be forwarded to another (external) address and/or an Out of Office (OOF) message set to inform senders that the mailbox may no longer be monitored.
- During the grace period, even though the mailbox remains active, no direct access is available to the expired/departed user.
- At the end of the grace period, the mailbox is flagged for deletion and messages sent to the mailbox receive a ‘Recipient unknown’ (#550) message
- The mailbox is deleted from the live system one month after the end of the grace period
- The mailbox data still remain within system backup tapes for a further (approximately) 90 days after deletion on line.
3. Summary of client’s responsibilities
The client's responsibilities vary according to the type of service. Clients in this context may be department or college IT Support Staff or individual end-users.
The following table lists services provided by, or related to, the Oxford Nexus Service but where it is expected that the primary means of support to the end-user will be provided by local IT support or similar.
The use of the Oxford Nexus Exchange Service is subject to, and implies, acceptance of any applicable regulations, including but not limited to:
- Regulations Relating to the use of Information Technology Facilities
- JANET(UK) Statement of JANET acceptable use policy
- Eduserv User Obligations for the use of Site Licensed Software and Datasets
- University Policy on Data Protection
In general, users are expected to:
- manage their storage space within the quota limits allocated;
- limit the number of items in any one folder to no more than 10,000 (to ensure adequate system performance it may be necessary to suspend access to the service for any user who has a folder containing in excess of 50,000 items);
- to refrain from activity detrimental to others or to the reputation of the University (as detailed in the University Regulations Relating to the Use of Information Technology Facilities);
- keep secure and private their Oxford username (SSO) password.
4. Premium services
- A chargeable large quota service is available for users requiring in excess of the 3GB discretionary quota. Any quota assigned above 3GB is charged to the user's sponsoring unit. Currently the charge is £1.50 per GB per month (or part thereof). Authorisation to use this service is submitted on the user's behalf by the sponsoring unit (generally the ITSS).