After several years of only low-key activity on the telematic front, the Open Universiteit of the Netherlands has made three radical changes in its overall network strategy. It is understood that these changes were not possible earlier, but now can happen because of the change in senior staff that has taken place there in the last two years.
The Ou is changing from the Token Ring infrastructure (mostly found in corporate sites using IBM mainframes) to the Ethernet system used in almost all universities. This is hardly surprising - what is surprising is that it has not happened earlier.
The Ou is also changing from IBM OS/2 to Microsoft Windows NT for their network servers. Few organisations now run OS/2.
Like many university sites the Ou has been agonising what to do to with its Microsoft Mail system. Microsoft Mail has no groupware facilities, limited capability for dial-in support, and no integration with the Internet. It is also commonly agreed by network managers that Microsoft Mail is hard to run well in a big organisation. Microsoft are pressing sites with Microsoft Mail to upgrade to Microsoft Exchange (see LIGIS issue 8). Lotus are pushing them to make the radical change to Lotus Notes (see LIGIS issue 10). In this case, the Open Universiteit has decided to adopt "none of the above", instead going for a POP-based email system. It is believed that both the Notes and Exchange lobbyists are bitterly disappointed.
Many network managers would agree that POP mail is a sensible decision for email - since it can be accessed from within Internet browsers such as Netscape Navigator and works over dial-up links as well as over Local Area Networks. However, it has no groupware capabilities. The Open Universiteit have taken the (so far) unusual step of proposing Usenet Newsgroups as their groupware answer for teaching. This is despite the fact that those universities who have used Usenet News for teaching have on the whole been disappointed.
However, the Ou have decided to use a commercial Usenet News server, running under Windows NT. This offers more facilities that the public-domain or shareware Usenet News servers beloved of the amateur Unix fraternity - in particular, it offers better security (so that for example, class assignments can be restricted to members of the class).
With these changes at the Dutch Ou and the emergence of a virtual campus at the FernUniversitat (see this edition of LIGIS), two of the three other European "mega-universities" have after a long period of inaction joined battle with the UK Open University for the future of Internet-based distance education. It only remains to be seen what UNED (the Spanish Open University) will do. We await developments with interest.