The Advocate

Chance to Improve GC Email System After Outage

James Trimarco
As students who use their Graduate Center email accounts undoubtedly know, GC email went down on Saturday January 15 and stayed out of service until January 20. The incident inspired eye-rolling and sighing among students who want decent computing resources at their school—especially now that the usual scapegoat, former Vice President for Information Resources James Haggard, has departed. But the Administration and the Doctoral Students Council had another reason to find the outage frustrating—for the past several years, both groups have been strongly urging GC students to use their school email accounts because, if they do not, it is nearly impossible to contact the whole Graduate Center Community with important information.

One week after the email outage, Associate Provost Stephen Brier sent out a message to the GC Community explaining the conditions that led to the problem and what the Administration is doing to correct them. The Graduate Center’s email uses Microsoft Exchange 5.5, a system that is about seven years old and is not capable of handling a workload that increases exponentially: as Brier points out, the email database grew from 16 gigabytes in June 2002 to 45 gigabytes in January 2005. This point was echoed by Gloria Barlow, the executive director for Information Resources, in a recent address to a Plenary of the Doctoral Students Council. There, Barlow said that the administration had known that something might go wrong with the email system, but hoped that it would not happen before their planned upgrading of the email system in Spring 2005.

All administration officials who have spoken about the outage have expressed appropriate regret and concern, and Associate Provost Brier’s message details a number of steps the Information Resources department is taking in order to improve the reliability and quality of email service. Because they are currently researching possible upgrades from the current Exchange program, this is the ideal time for students to suggest improvements or specific services they would like to see implemented. At the DSC Plenary mentioned above, Gloria Barlow said that input about email features students would like to see would be very useful to her, but that this input must be received as soon as possible in order to be taken into account.

Please send all suggestions on email service to advocate@gc.cuny.edu and they will be forwarded to the appropriate administrators. We encourage students to view the outage as an opportunity to improve computing at the Graduate Center, and not as a reason to abandon the system.