INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SERVICES
May 2006
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Announcements from the Bulletin, Today, Notification-L

05/25/06, Leaving for All or Part of the Summer?
Please change your voice mail greeting to correspond with your time away. It's a great courtesy to your callers. To change your greeting, access your voice mailbox, then press 4, then 3, then 2 and follow the prompts. For further information feel free to call Telecommunications at x6566.

You can also set a 'vacation' message telling your e-mail correspondents when you'll be gone and when you expect to return. Go to mail.macalester.edu and click on the Vacation Monkey. Then log into OCS Webmail and scroll down to the "Auto Reply" function. The expiration date you set will be the LAST day on which the automatic reply is sent. Type a short message in the text box, then scroll down and click the "Submit" button, and log out of OCS. Full documentation is available at www.macalester.edu/its/docs/ocswebmail.pdf. [Bulletin]

05/18/06, Voice Mailboxes Going
Voice mailboxes for faculty and staff members and language instructors (native speakers) whose contracts expire May 31 (per Human Resources) will be deleted on June 1. Please contact Telecommunications, x6566, before that date if you will be remaining on campus after June 1. Student voice mailboxes will be deleted starting May 15. Students remaining on campus for the summer will retain their voice mailboxes.

For others, please remember to change your voice mail greeting for the summer alerting callers to your office hours, if any. To change your greeting, access your voice mailbox, then press 4, then 3 and follow the prompts.

Any phone or voice mail questions? Call Telecommunications at x6566. [Bulletin]

05/16/06, Account Closures: SENIORS ONLY
Yesterday's Notification-L messages "Graduate E-Mail, Voice Mail and Network Account Closure" and "Alumni E-Mail Forwarding" are for our just-graduated seniors in the Class of 2006. E-mail and network accounts for other students, and for all faculty and staff, will not be affected. [Notification-L]

05/15/06, Alumni E-Mail Forwarding
Congratulations to the Class of 2006! Now that you're officially Macalester College alumni, you may wish to get an alumni e-mail account. All you need to do is call the Alumni Office at (651) 696-6295 or send e-mail to Judy Keppers, keppers@macalester.edu, and request more information. [Notification-L]

05/15/06, Graduates' E-Mail, Voice Mail and Network Account Closure

Please note, the following information about network and e-mail accounts refers only to seniors who graduated over the weekend - Macalester's Class of 2006. Other students, staff and faculty accounts are not affected.

Computer Files and E-Mail

Do you have e-mail on the Macalester e-mail server or files in your personal network folder that you want saved? Your accounts will be closed as of June 1, 2006. Make sure you retrieve any needed files before this date. If you've graduated, but will continue to work on campus over the summer, contact the ITS Help Desk at x6525. Temporary e-mail forwarding is available until the end of August, and this, too, can be done with a phone call or e-mail to the Help Desk (helpdesk@macalester.edu).

Voice Mail

Starting Monday, May 15 2006, students remaining on campus for the summer will have their voice mailboxes relocated to their new rooms. All other student voice mailboxes will be removed from service. If you would like your voice mailbox to stay active until July 1, 2006, please contact Telecommunications at x6566 or e-mail Kelly Borke (borke@macalester.edu) with your name, extension and voice mailbox number. [Notification-L]

05/10/06, E-Mail Outage May 10
We apologize for today's e-mail outage. As with yesterday's outage, there continues to be a problem with the OCS smtp processes failing. We again tried just restarting these processes, but found we could not, and had to restart the entire system.

We are actively working with Oracle to make the transition to OCS 10g as rapidly and smoothly as possible.

We are as frustrated with this continuing problem as you are, and apologize for the inconvenience the disruption in email service has caused the Macalester community. [Notification-L]

05/09/06, OCS E-Mail Outages
There was an e-mail outage on Saturday night (May 6), from approximately 10:00 PM to midnight. The smtp process on OCS again died sometime earlier Saturday, and no messages were getting delivered all day. Approximately 15,000 messages had been queueing up during the day Saturday while this problem was happening. After the restart, the messages were delivered.

Again today, the same thing happened, but it was caught earlier. We still had to restart OCS today at approximately 10:30 AM, and it was down for about one hour.

ITS once again apologizes to the community for these interruptions, especially during finals week. [Notification-L]

05/09/06, Registration Now Open for Classrooms of the Future XII
Registration is now open at www.associatedcolleges-tc.org/cotf. This year the symposium takes place from 8:00 AM - 4:00 PM on Tuesday, May 23, at the University of St. Thomas (Minneapolis campus). This year's theme is "Critical Reflections on Technology."

COTF is a day of presentations, workshops and discussions about issues and applications of technology in higher education. Presentations provide an opportunity for faculty, administrators and support professionals to come together to talk about their practices for teaching with technology.

The keynote address is by Dr. Stephen Brookfield, Distinguished Professor at the University of St. Thomas. His keynote, "Critical Reflections on Technology," will relate his large body of work on critical theory, critical thinking and discussion to technology.

Featured Speakers:
The top-rated speakers from COTF XI have been invited back to present in the afternoon in concurrent sessions. Confirmed speakers include:

Barbara Elvegrog, "Using Current Brain Research to Create Engaging Classrooms"
Aimee Houser, "A Heideggerian Critique of Course Management Systems: Wikis as an Alternative"

Hope to see you there.
- Brian Longley, Media Services [Bulletin]

05/05/06, E-Mail List Problems and Restart Today
Messages sent to e-mail lists today, even those sent in the morning, were not delivered until late this afternoon. Also, OCS was restarted at approximately 3:00 PM today.

The problem with e-mail lists was caused by an OCS process called "smtp_out" failing. It only failed partially, as only mail to mailing lists was affected, while messages to individual users (or several users, if listed on the 'To' or 'Cc' lines) was delivered. We tried just restarting this process, but found we could not, and had to restart the entire system.

When OCS was restarted, the messages to mailing lists were delivered. We apologize, again, for the disruption this has caused everyone. [Notification-L]

05/02/06, Media Services Closed for 2 Hours Tuesday
Media Services will be closed from 4:30 PM - 6:30 PM on Tuesday, May 2.

05/02/06, Macalester Hires New IT Leader
Jerry Sanders of Evanston, IL, has accepted an offer to become the Associate Vice President for Information Technology Services at Macalester. In this role, he will be responsible for administrative and academic technology, and hardware and software support at the college.

Jerry's direct reports at Macalester will be David Sisk, desktop services, Ted Fines, network services, Ramón Rentas, administrative technology services, and Barron Koralesky, academic technology services. As previously announced, the Library and Media Services now report through the Provost's line.

He brings extensive experience with technology and higher education. For more than 20 years, he served in various roles of increasing responsibility at Loyola University in Chicago, a time as the Chief Information Officer.

Jerry will report to David Wheaton, Vice President for Administrative and Finance. He will join the college's staff on June 12. [Bulletin, also 5/5, 4/28]

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