For more than 20 years, Lyris List Manager served the Cornell community as a trusted platform for managing email distribution lists. However, once the vendor discontinued support for the platform, and as email security requirements evolved, Cornell chose to move to Simplelists. The new platform was well positioned to meet modern deliverability standards and support the university's current and future communication needs.

The Cornell E-List team successfully completed the transition this year, migrating approximately 5,000 e-lists from the legacy Lyris List Manager platform to Simplelists. This success was possible thanks to the collaborative effort involving e-list owners, pilot participants, campus partners, and Cornell IT staff.

Simplelists delivers multiple benefits for e-list administrators and subscribers, including:

• Improved email deliverability and compatibility with modern email security standards
• A more flexible administrative permissions model
• Simpler and more secure administrator sign-in
• Enhanced API capabilities for automating list membership management
• Improved web-based tools for joining and leaving e-lists
• Increased message size limits
• Ease of use

A Community-Wide Effort

Cornell IT extends its thanks to all who participated in the pilot and early-adopter migrations. The lessons learned during the pilot phase contributed substantially to the overall success of the project.

The migration itself required extensive collaboration. Special recognition goes to the approximately 1,450 e-list owners who shepherded their lists through the migration process during the spring and summer. Their efforts ensured a smooth transition for more than 1.4 million list memberships supported by the service.

Migrating each list required careful verification that settings, memberships, and functionality transferred correctly. E-list owners also invested significant time in learning the new system and communicating updated posting addresses and procedures to their communities.

A special thank you goes to Andre Hafner from Cornell's College of Architecture, Art, and Planning. Hafner developed a tool that enables list managers to create and send richly formatted emails through Simplelists. This tool replicates a popular feature that had been available in Lyris, but was not included in Simplelists, and its absence was one of the most cited concerns during the transition.

Looking Ahead

Cornell IT looks forward to working closely with Simplelists to refine the platform based on feedback from the community. IT staff will continue to identify opportunities to enhance the experience for list owners and subscribers alike.

The successful migration represents not only a technological upgrade, but also the collective effort of thousands of community members working together to ensure a vital campus communication service remains strong for years to come.