When the VCU student e-mail switched to Lotus Notes this past summer, the calls started to come in at Administrative Information Technology, the university’s technology help desk.
Students began to respond around June 20, the first day that new incoming mail was directed to the new student accounts. What followed was some frustration, which the Commonwealth Times documented Aug. 20 in student complaints, along with some confusion and general growing pains.
Freshman Natalie Jones is one of many students still adjusting to the transition.
“When I tried to read my e-mail, at first I didn’t know how to delete it because I didn’t have the trash can and I had to right-click to delete it. Usually my e-mail piles up, so that slows the process down,” she said. “And it didn’t have check boxes where you can check the boxes or check ‘delete all’ … so it takes up a lot of my time.”
Mark Willis, assistant vice president for AIT, and Scott Davis, director of Client Services, have been involved in the system change from the beginning. Now, after initial complaints, they say the next step is stability.
“We had some tuning issues, there were some performance issues early on, the system was slow to get mail,” Willis said. “We got all of those issues worked out.”
After AIT began to consider moving students onto a more reliable system, an independent consultant suggested that they would need an “industrial strength” platform to support VCU’s several thousands of students. The platform of choice became the UNIX-based Sun Solaris, which was a change for an AIT department that had always used Microsoft Windows in the past.
Since then, Willis said factors including familiarity with the platform have helped AIT run the system more smoothly. Even though some people at VCU are referring to Lotus Notes as a new system, roughly 3,500 faculty and staff have already been using the system, with some as early as 1996.
Still, some students wonder why the change in systems was made in the first place.
“It seems a little more complex than it needs to be,” said Sarah Naigle, a first-year student who plans to use her VCU e-mail account only for school-related communication.
Here are some of the reasons for the e-mail switch: Willis said the mail1/mail2 setup involved older technology and open-source software, while IBM, an outside vendor, supports Lotus Notes. The system also uses what is called a clustering approach, meaning it is redundant or backed up. To put it simply, Willis said this all adds up to reliable e-mail service.
“Mail should never be down at all,” he said. “We’re looking for 100 percent up-time.”
When AIT put the mail1/mail2 system in place, Willis said e-mail was treated as an added feature. Now, everyone from administrators, to faculty and staff, down to students count on being able to access their e-mail when, and often where, they need it.
“There’s a whole lot of different ways of getting access to your e-mail,” Willis said. “Particularly for students, if they’re switching between classes, we know a lot of times people will stop at the library and check mail.”
Because students are beginning to access their e-mail in a variety of ways, Lotus Notes will allow e-mail access via some Web-enabled portable devices. This is in addition to traditional methods, like IMAP clients such as Microsoft Outlook and through the Web. Willis called these access options another improvement over the previous system.
“Students will not see something like mail1/mail2 when they go out [in the work force],” Willis said. “Lotus Notes, that platform is known worldwide.”
Recently, students like Jones have begun warming up to the system’s other aspects.
“I like the whole layout plan-the way it has all the information with calendars and things like that. It has more features,” she said.
Aside from the addition of instant messaging, calendars and the ability to tag messages for follow-ups, Davis said AIT has made other improvements to help the system run more smoothly.
Unlike on mail1/mail2 where quotas went unenforced, Davis said they will use soft quotas for file sizes in student accounts to ensure that overflowing inboxes don’t slow the down servers. Also, the system will archive old mail on a weekly basis rather than nightly-a change that will take additional strain off the system.
With VCU growing each year, Willis said AIT could see that the mail1/mail2 arrangement where students, staff and faculty were balanced across two servers could not last.
Now, the e-mail system uses a total of six servers: four servers for students and two for faculty and staff. Although Willis said they were broken up based on the different e-mail needs of students and faculty, the technology functions seamlessly so that users do not have to specify which server another user is on in order to send messages. This marks another move away from the past when there was a distinction between mail1 and mail2 accounts.
The cost of switching students to Lotus Notes, which mainly involved hardware purchases including new servers, was covered by a special allocation in the university budget for a one-time emergency.
The purchase of Sun Solaris servers will reach several projects since this type of server will also be used for VCU’s core systems (including student systems and human resources) and James Branch Cabell Library.
Although licenses for all students to use Lotus Notes would normally be added to the bill, IBM provided the licenses to VCU for free.
One question remains: Have AIT’s efforts paid off? The student response to Lotus Notes, though still mixed, is gradually becoming more positive.
Sophomore Lauren Rice said that while loading her e-mail still takes time, she said she plans to use VCU e-mail as her main account for all types of communication, school-related or otherwise.
“I think it takes more to log in. It takes longer to load but not a significant amount of time,” said Rice, who had no preference between the new and old system.
Others said they had more trouble with mail1/mail2 than Lotus Notes. First-year student Kristen Fox has had an e-mail account with VCU since December, when she was accepted to the university.
“I’ve heard people that have [had trouble], but I check it about three times a day and I have never had any problems,” she said.
Computer engineering major Bryan Hartley said he has had his share of difficulty with the system.
“It’s inefficient, it’s very slow to get stuff done. It’s just hard to work with,” he said.
But having heard most of the early complaints, Willis said that at this point, most problems could be resolved with a call to the technology help desk and a few clicks of a mouse.
“Students say ‘I can’t open a mail message, I can’t forward, I can’t send,’ and what we’re finding are [incorrect] configuration settings in the browsers or their browsers need to be updated,” he said.
One common problem, Willis said, involved some browsers’ built-in pop-up blockers, which should be adjusted to allow pop-ups from the VCU mail server.
Both Willis and Davis seemed to agree that the most common complaint stems from an intentional feature that prevents automatic forwarding of messages to non-VCU e-mail accounts. There was a great deal of debate, Willis said, before AIT decided to prevent forwarding for several reasons.
“Once an e-mail leaves the university domain, there’s never any assurance that it gets delivered to (MSN Hotmail) or Yahoo! or literally any other account,” he said. “The flip side is a lot of faculty and staff will not open e-mail from those free accounts-a lot of them just have filters. If e-mail comes from Yahoo! or (MSN Hotmail), they block it.
“So there’s no guarantee if a student is using that account to try to contact a faculty member that they’re ever going to get through.”
Willis said this uncertainty of delivery should provoke students who don’t use their VCU accounts to contact the AIT Help Desk at (804) 828-8240 to resolve any problems.