OCC upgrade disrupts communication

Students had to wait to use the dorms' computer labs. (Photo from defacto archives)

Nearly two weeks after the end of the break, AUBG students, faculty and staff are still experiencing problems caused by the upgrade and maintenance of the AUBG e-mail system, when accessing their e-mail from the web.

According to an e-mail the Office of Communications and Computing (OCC) sent to all students on March 11, the problem with the web access was caused by the antivirus software used by the e-mail system. OCC immediately sent the information regarding the issue to the antivirus software vendor, Latchezar Filtchev, OCC director said. "We are in correspondence. Hope the solution will be found soon," Filtchev added.

"As a result of this upgrade we have now better, improved, more secured and feature enhanced web access to AUBG e-mail system. The maximum size of each e-mail box now is set up to 200 MB," the March 11 e-mail reads.

The university did not pay any additional fees for the software upgrade of the e-mail system because "it is included in the price for regular software subscriptions," Filtchev said.

Politics professor Ben DeDominicis said he likes the new web access system because it offers some new features and because "it looks nicer." "Sometimes I have issues replying to e-mails but I assume [that will be fixed in the future]," he added.

The e-mail system maintenance and upgrade was announced in an e-mail OCC sent to all students and faculty on February 25. "During the break OCC will perform regular maintenance and upgrade of AUBG e-mail system. Short interruptions in the service are possible," the e-mail read.

Journalism professors Sandra Earley and Phelps Hawkins were in Athens during the break, and they were unable to access their e-mail accounts for two days, Earley said. When she found out she cannot access her e-mail from the web, Earley was, "to put it nicely, frustrated. If I remember correctly, Phelps [Hawkins] did a lot of swearing."

"Once we were able to get in, it was an incredibly frustrating process," Earley said. "Phelps and I basically [...] just clicked around and somebody would get something to work and would yell 'it's in the drafts.' [...] Eventually we figured out that, with all the clicking, once you wanted to reply or to send a new email you should go to drafts, and there you would find it." When we figured out how to do the "basic stuff [...], oh boy, we were happy," she added.

"I believe that [a] part of my job is being in contact with students almost at all times. I check [my] e-mail in the evening to see if students need something, I answer e-mails as quickly as I get them, [...] and when I can't do my job [...], particularly when I can't contact students, I'm angry and very upset," Earley added.

"Now we're switching over so that we do much more of our e-mail traffic on separate e-mails, not AUBG, so that we have some confidence that people can communicate with us. I [am] increasingly moving over towards facebook because it is useful for students," Hawkins said. When home, Hawkins just checks his AUBG e-mail account for "anything that requires my action, I'll then go to another e-mail program to take care of it," he said.

"It struck me that the OCC approach, the thinking on it, was exactly right. They let us know [about the changes.] It's just I'm not sure that any of us knew how dramatic or drastic [the changes were] going to be," Hawkins added.

"I appreciate that OCC told us that it was going to do some maintenance on the system. I would have appreciated if I had known that I was not [going to] have access for a couple of days. I would have planned my life differently," Earley said.

"I wasn't quite satisfied [...] after the break because we had to go downstairs [to] the computer lab because we weren't able to open our [e-mail accounts] from the room and a lot of people were in the lab so you had to wait and it was wasting [our] time. I read the e-mail and I guessed that it was going to be like the previous maintenance that they had before, that it's going to be just for a few days, but it was like more than a week," student Maya Vasileva said.

"The troubleshot works together with software vendors are in progress and we expect problems to be solved soon," the March 11 e-mail reads.