I'm pleased to announce the launch of the Athena Private Workstation
Discovery project. This project will explore how to improve the Athena
Private Workstation model so that we can increase satisfaction to the
established customer base and attract new customers from the pool of Unix
server owners. In addition, this announcement is also a call for additional
participation in this effort.

The goal of this project is to design and make available an improved Athena
Private Workstation to satisfy customers who need a secure and easy way to
maintain their Unix server. If the model is well conceived, we may be able
to increase our ability to serve the MIT community in providing maintenance
for Unix servers.  Success in this project will also benefit IS; if we can
increase the campus population of "well behaved", centrally supported,
private UNIX workstations, we will be adding to the solution space for
system support of decentralized machines, an issue that faces customers and
IS today.

The deliverables for the discovery portion of this project are:

1. Creating a list of necessary features for the Athena Private
Workstation. Identify the drawbacks to the current offerings for private
workstations.

 2. Create a high level model for the Athena Private Workstation.

 3. A timeline for making the Athena Private Workstation available. (This
will help answer how much (if anything) can be done to meet the customer
needs with the upcoming Athena release in summer of 2000)

 4. A cost estimate for the work required.

 5. An outreach plan to create incentives & motivation for current and
 future Athena Public Workstation customers.

  6. A business plan that accounts for both costs and incentives.
This will include a review of the current Athena fee structure.

The project is in the IS Strategic Plan to Deliver new I/T products,
support and services and is part of the strategy to improve and extend the
Athena academic computing services and environment. The project is
sponsored by Vijay Kumar. Miki Lusztig and Dan Winship are co-team-leaders
and will jointly contribute the equivalent of 30% of an FTE to the project.
As team leaders, Dan and Miki have identified the following skills and
experience necessary to complete the team.

The team needs people who have experience in running an Athena Private
Workstation , people who would like to run them but do not find them
satisfactory, and people who would like the MIT campus to run Athena
Private Workstation for their Unix servers, since they are secure and
predictable.

The team actively seeks representation and input from the Athena Server
Operations team, the Network Operations team, teams in W91 who take care
of Unix servers, present Athena Private Workstation customers, and
potential Athena Private Workstation customers.

If you are interested in this project, please contact Miki (miki@mit.edu,
x3-0127) or Dan (danw@mit.edu, x3-6712).

The team is in the process of establishing its mailing list and project
notebook.

This is a challenging and rewarding initiative to extend the Athena
computing environment and its services and to provide a scaleable, secure
administrative environment to a broader set of campus customers.  Please
join me in supporting their work.

Greg