Fourteen (14) people from our side came to the meeting, we were met by the rector, the university director, the prorector and by Lars Oftedal, the IT director. There was also a woman who was presented as being from the communications department.
The meeting was held on the 10th floor, since "many" came from our side. Apparently they were hoping that hardly anyone came, so they had not decided the meeting room.
The rector opened the meeting and chaired it. He only talked in Norwegian.
He began by saying something like "Well, welcome to this... uhm, interesting meeting. We assigned it 30 minutes. We understand you want to pose us some questions, so let us do a presentation round and then start with the questions"
I tried to say "can't we introduce us while doing the questions, since we have so little time?", but he insisted that a presentation round was necessary.
And so everyone said his or her name and which department they came from (except for Janne Bondi Johannessen, who arrived a little later).
Maja said "in my opinion this is also a problem of values: an university should be concerned with open standards and not proprietatory technology, and this is an important issue of an university policy and university politics. Our technologies should support the university's policy and values, not undermine them."
Then Paul asked about "whether the effort to completely replace the «critical» university e-mail infrastructure was justified given the relatively small number of people who stood to benefit" -- as he reported later, he, as most of us, was distressed by realising that, instead of answering our questions, the exercise was all about collecting our "concerns" and then brushing them aside.
Cristian said (in English) "In all the documents that we have see related to this project we have not seen any numbers, any amounts, about how much this project is going to cost. Can you give us such numbers. showing calculations about how much this project will cost now and estimates for the future costs? We know that UiO has budget problems from the cuts that we researchers at IFI had in our travel funds. How much this project will affect the UiO budget?"
Ute said "lately I have experienced two IT decisions as problematic, the one is EasyRecruit, which saves a lot of time for the administration, but causes much extra work to us scientists. The other big waste of money is the current economic system, which not even the administration has good use of and damns us to shadow accounting... I would like to be sure this is not another one".
At this occasion there was an intervention from the table and the rector said "maybe we should now provide some answers. If the solution would be more expensive, we would not support it ", and turned to Lars Oftedal (LO) "can you answer about the price?".
LO said that this change would not be expensive for the university because the university would save in Lotus Notes licenses, (and Syllabus licences?) and they would only need some few licenses, so the whole would cost around 70,000 NOK, surely under 100,000.
I managed to ask: "you are comparing to now, but what if you had a free software solution? You would also save the Lotus notes etc. stuff, and would have to pay no licenses. "
He agreed: "yes, an open source solution would be cheaper." I think that both the rector and GEB were definitely not happy with that (truthful) answer.
"But why this change in the first place?"
GEB said "this is something we believe is going to do your everydaylife easier, making work at UiO more effective".
I tried to say "this is possibly true for administration, but we do not see any proof that this is a requirement from the users", and tried to cite their user surveys.
Then they got very excited and PR-like and said (LO) "these user surveys are just a tiny part of our talk with the users. There were other venues". And GEB said "we counducetd countless/many interviews and were in many meetings, and all we heard was that «everyone wanted an integrated e-mail and calender». Round two thousand (2,000) people were consulted in this process and they all agreed."
Martin exclaimed, "do I get that right that apart from the figures you publish you have some additional information and this is where the decision is based on?" and all of us were in an state of excitement to get some data...
Eirik asked: "what meetings are you talking about? which allmøter? Do you have documentation about that?" And then the pro-rector Ragnhild yelled at him: "It is your fault if you were not at the allmøte".
Eirik then said "The meetings I heard about were by invitation. I was not invited. You cannot call something an allmøte if you do not invite all". Others also confirmed that they had not been at any allmøte but had heard about invited meetings.
Then some of us said, "It is strange that you don't have any documentation of that". No, it was all oral, but they were really sure the participants all agreed on an integrated e-mail and calendar.
GEB said "We choose Microsoft because this was the most user-friendly solution".
LO added warmly, maybe too warmly, "and we had a lot of comments in our initial user survey, and all said they wanted Outlook". I noticed he mentioned "Outlook", not "integration"...
Then Jan said "I think I must have responded to the USIT inquiry a long time ago. When I did, I tried to express my anger over having to use SAP. For me, a totally useless program. My response cannot be construed to mean that I am in favour of yet another program in order to promote more bureaucracy, not less. Further, I do believe that quite a few university employees responded to the inquiry with a similar intention. So, I feel that my response has been hijacked -- in order to promote programs with functions that I and most university employees do not need in my/our daily work."
The university director GEB seized the opportunity to say, "yes, we heard a lot of that stuff in those allmøter, people «gidder ikke» to use so many systems. This is why we need an integrated system. This calender stuff is just a little bit of our general strategy".
Jan answered back "How can we believe the university management when you continue to say the same about SAP, a program we probably still have to live with in parallel to Outlook etc. despite its clear deficiencies... Still, after three years or so, all of us who are not members of the teaching staff, have to fill in information about our daily doings in a program that, apart from a thoroughly impractical and outdated interface, doesn't have the adequate categories, erroneously produces loads of error messages that nobody understands, and gives you your flextime balance the next day."
I asked Martin if he wanted to talk (because I mistook a movement of his), and he said no.
Paul (was it Paul?) asked "has there been a risk analysis?"
Eirik asked "what about the other platforms, can you guarantee that there will be support for them? We know that Oxford changed to Exchange and it was virtually impossible to use any other platform after"
LO got quite irritated with this remark and said "we said there will be clients for the other platforms, this is not difficult at all".
Paul noted that "interoperability with Exchange was a common complaint in organisations that had it", and he asked why it was so difficult to deliver a strategy for non-Windows clients when providing compatibility with Exchange was apparently so easy. This remark seemde to shake considerably LO, and was not answered.
Cristian asked about the lock-in problem, and whether there was any guarantee from Microsoft that they would continue to support interoperability with other platforms. He also added that Microsoft is well-known to do these kinds of tricks: first support other systems and then stop supporting after getting monopoly.
LO answered that "Of course he could not guarantee that Microsoft would not change its policy later" but he thought that would be very little probable, given the recent course of events and that they (MS) were working heavily with this stuff." And he insisted, on the server change, that "this is just a small and insignificant part, it is not a big change".
Eirik seized this assertion and said: "then you are contradicting yourselves, since we have just heard that this a little part of a larger policy, the IHR", and the UiO director GEB confirmed, "yes, this is all for the good of you. This is just a tiny bit in a large endeavour, the IHR".
Then I asked "but there were three things you wanted to integrate, and as far as we understand, the room booking is not yet done. How come you have decided so quickly?" No answer.
Cristian asked "going back to the costs, how much will this change cost in teaching /education of the new program(s)? This is a major cost!"
Other people nodded and Jan repeated in Norwegian, "yes, what will education cost?"
LO said "Not everyone has to be taught, a lot of people will pick it themselves, I myself did, when I changed (had to change?) into Outlook a while ago. But no, we don't have numbers. We were doing/did what was easier for the people. Everyone wanted an integrated e-mail and calender system!"
Maja said "I would like to know what do you mean by user-friendliness when you discuss that, because I do a lot of work on user-friendly design, and I don't understand what you mean by saying that it is the most user-friendly solution". No answer to this.
I said "in your SUIT 2013, 80.4% people were happy with email, so it is strange that you have to change it"
Eirik said, "especially in some environments, which use Unix/Linus it is going to distrupt our scientific work", and LO came back to discussing Linux...
Martin then interrupted and addressed directly LO, "technical details are interesting and important but we should also consider the larger context here. We would like to know whose responsibility this decision is. We understand that, since it is you who answer all questions, it is actually you who took the decisions?"
Then LO said, "no, I am taking orders, but you wanted the integrated calender and email", and GEB said "No, _I_ took the decision, no doubt about that; and I trust the technical answers given by LO. But I don't know anything about IT, so it makes no sense to say that this was decided beforehand". This was an interesting answer, since nobody had said or hinted that this had been decided beforehand.
Paul then asked "How important are standards and interoperability for the university leadership and UiO?" and was answered with the trivial assertion by LO that they are important.
Then the rector said "Time is over, thank you for your questions that helped us to think better, anyway we had a lot of feedback from the allmøtene, which wored as a kind of local democracy, and we will" (looking at LO) "try to follow all you said here. We don't think there is any danger of lock-in, we are, after all, and important customer for Microsoft." I believe the general body language of of all us who heard him showed that we felt this to be a silly statement, although nobody laughed out loud.
I interrupted "But you did not say if the decision was final, and when it was taken".
He said: "It is final. As to when it was taken, ...", he waited some time, and went on "I don't remember/don't know when it was taken. But we will take your questions into consideration. I have full confidence in the decision." he was saying some more (political) things, which I think most people did not hear because Martin interrupted in English asking "Is this a yes or a no?" and I/we moved our attention to Martin and said "it is a yes", and the rector probably thought this was enough and raised himself.
Asgeir still said "I am appalled by how this big decision has been made: The need for integrated calendar and email was defined in public meetings (allmøter) that I was NOT invited to, since at HF only explicitly invited people took part. So there is an undocumented need for integration, and I do not understand how such a big decision can be made without a cost/benefit analysis", but at this time all of us were shaking our heads so appalled that apparently everyone forgot to thank for the meeting (both from their side and from ours) and they left the room.