“System failure.” “Perfect storm.” “Plagued with glitches.” “Deeply frustrating and regrettable.” These were some of the phrases used to describe the April 9–16 outage of the Metro e-mail system — and that was how college offi cials felt about the situation. Across Auraria and throughout the extended campus, Metro students, staff and faculty voiced anger, impatience and confusion on technical problems that plunged one of the college’s main lines of communication into darkness. As the Metro Division of Information Technology investigates errors that transformed a planned weekend upgrade into a frantic week of troubleshooting, questions remain regarding the timing, scale and impact of the e-mail outage.

A6 • NEWS • APRIL 22, 2010 • THE METROPOLITAN • THIS JUST IN: Sigmund Freud had a morbid fear of ferns.

Faculty surveyThe Metropolitan sent a survey to allow teachers to honestly and anonymously comment on the loss of electronic communication. Faculty and staff responded, saying they missed opportunities to publish academic work, lost entire lesson plans and had to cancel class because their work depended on access to MetroConnect. Some also voiced their frustration about IT’s lack of communication during the extended outage. Here are some of their comments:Editor’s note: Some responses have been cut for space. However, all can be found online at: themet.metrostudentmedia.com/news

“I am waiting for replies from two journals to which I submitted articles. I have no idea if I missed replies regarding these submissions.”

“IT would fail my course.”

“It took 40 minutes to e-mail three of my classes today due to the extended amount of time it took to download and transmit.”

“Information provided on Metro-Connect was contradictory and/or in-complete. For example, the message at the start of MetroConnect stated that e-mail was down. YET, another message (that we had to link to) gave the e-mail locations for students and faculty/staff . Many people (that I know of ) were put-off by the fi rst message believing they had NO access to e-mail.

EXTRA and redundant communica-tion is needed at these times of heavy load and high stress!”

“I am disappointed that I lost e-mail during the outage and feel that I am more disconnected from my depart-ment.”

By Ben Wiebesiekwiebesib@mscd.edu

Emergency workers toiled through the night April 14 to re-unite Metro students, staff and fac-ulty with their missing e-mails.

Staff members with the Metro Division of Information Technology, working with consultants from Sun-Gard Data Systems, Inc., completed a migration of all Metro e-mail ac-counts to new software.

Interim Vice President of Infor-mation Technology Steve Beaty said the transfer of e-mail accounts was part of a planned outage for the col-lege computer networks and includ-ed an upgrade for MetroConnect. However, the e-mail outage lasted several days longer than expected due to technical issues.

“To get everybody’s e-mail back up, we spent the night inputting 20,000 student e-mail accounts into [Google’s] Gmail, by hand,” Beaty said.

Director of IT Infrastructure Ser-vices Joseph Lamers said any large-scale integration of new software could run into glitches.

“We’ve had p e o p l e h e r e a r o u n d t h e clock since Fri-day afternoon (April 9),” Beck said. “The inte-gration of the e-mail system upgrade and the MetroCon-nect upgrade, and this is not an excuse, if it isn’t the most complicated thing we have going, it’s pretty close.”

In an April 19 letter, Metro Presi-dent Stephen Jordan apologized for the impact the outage had on the ability of faculty and staff to work and to communicate effectively.

“I want to make sure that ev-eryone understands that the time planned for the April 9-12 outage was the only time frame the college’s academic calendar would allow the system to be down without impact-ing course registration and other col-lege online business,” Jordan wrote in the letter.

Jordan accepted responsibility for the decision on when to start the system upgrade; a decision he made after discussions with the college’s vice presidents about the anticipated impact of the outage.

“Over the last six weeks, we communicated the planned outage through (the electronic bulletin ser-vice) @Metro, personal announce-ments, e-mails and in many meetings throughout the campus,” Jordan said.

Director of IT Application Ser-vices Rick Beck said Metro had been planning the upgrades for more than a year, but the college had diffi cul-ties securing the necessary contracts with outside vendors.

“There was a misunderstanding with the state purchasing offi ce,” Beck said. “They thought we were trying to work around the rules they have for soliciting bids from contrac-tors. But it was just a misunderstand-ing because Metro was following the rules all along.”

Once the confusion was cleared up, the project was pushed back from the 2009 Thanksgiving break time-line the IT department division origi-nally planned on, he said.

In an April 15 e-mail to college instructors, Metro Provost and Vice

President for Academic Affairs Vicki Golich called on faculty mem-bers to work patiently with students to fi nish coursework despite the week’s e-mail outage.

“Likewise, you may have e-mailed an as-signment that [students] couldn’t/didn’t receive, and therefore couldn’t/didn’t complete,” Golich wrote in the e-mail.

Jordan praised the IT Division for working 24 hours a day, seven

days a week to correct the e-mail problem.

“I want to thank IT for their hard work during this critical time,” Jor-dan said. “Even Google was ‘shocked’ that IT was able to create 50,000 new e-mail accounts in such a short amount of time. In fact, Google asked if they could share our success story through Twitter.”

After a long week troubleshoot-ing the e-mail outage, Beaty was looking forward to upcoming IT proj-ects involving smaller degrees of un-certainty.

“The focus is going to shift back to things like supporting the aca-demic labs and updating [Microsoft] Internet Explorer on the computers,” Beaty said.

IT outage

Communication meltdown

Metro’s Tech To-Do List

Interim IT Vice President Steve Beaty File photo by Jessie Taves • jtaves@mscd.edu

“This has put me way behind in grading papers submitted electronically.”

Graphic by Drew Jaynes • ajaynes1@mscd.edu

GOOD TO KNOW: Reindeer like to eat bananas. • THE METROPOLITAN • APRIL 22, 2010 • NEWS • A7

Survey exposesfaculty frustrationstoward IT upgrade

By Julie Vitkovskayauvitkovs@mscd.edu

Metro teachers are “outraged” over the loss of their primary mode of communication and many have already experienced academic con-sequences.

As the extended outage contin-ues, more professors are nervous they will not be able to contact stu-dents through their old e-mail ac-counts, which have not been fully synced with the new e-mail system.

In a survey given to faculty by The Metropolitan, numerous respon-dents said they have lost archived e-mail, missed critical conference calls and experienced delays in their old system, which they continue to use.

Faculty members have also stat-ed confusion and frustration about the timing of the e-mail upgrade with some calling the delay “embar-rassing” and damaging to Metro’s reputation.

Metro’s Information Technology Division does not have an expected date for completing the e-mail merg-er. Of the 94 faculty members who responded the question of how they reacted to the loss of communica-tion in their classroom, the top three chosen responses included handing out printed material, using personal e-mail and postponing lectures and assignments. Others used the Black-board Vista system and only two pro-fessors stated they cancelled class.

Not all faculty and staff members are satisfied with the written apology issued by Metro President Stephen Jordan.

A professor, who chose to be un-named, said the apology shows a disregard for the teachers’ regular workloads, time and effort.

Multiple professors out of the 79 who responded with their personal ex-periences said they want a full expla-nation of what happened and to see accountability in the administration.

When asked how the faculty has adapted to the communication loss, Accounting Chair Rick Crosser said, “I don’t think it’s adapting; I think it’s just tolerating.”

Crosser said his faculty remains resilient to the communication loss, but he said he has received only a few e-mails from his students.

“It seems like someone has missed the ball here,” Crosser said. “People are pretty frustrated about this.”

Crosser’s colleague, Doug Laufer, said it was disappointing that some of his students missed work oppor-tunities and caused “professionally-awkward” situations. A student in his class who applied for summer employment could not concretely know if the employer had contacted him back because of the e-mail mal-function.

“I think students are getting less information than faculty,” Laufer said.

Laufer said he empathizes with the IT department for doing their jobs as quickly as possible, but be-lieves administrators are out of touch with what matters for students and faculty.

English Department Chair Cindy Carlson said in an e-mail: “Let us say it has been spectacularly difficult and remains so well into the second week.”

Department of Health Profes-

sions Chair Nancy Shanks said in an e-mail: “This continues to be a disas-ter for us, we continue to not have access to what we need to do our jobs and we are all wasting tons of time trying to figure out where to look for things and what has been missed in the last 11 days.”

Adjunct Biology Professor Amanda Hannah said her frustra-tion did not come from accessing her e-mail, but from losing Metro-Connect-posted documents. Hannah said she used her Microsoft Outlook e-mail because it was quicker and did not expire after a long period of time.

“You have to have a plan B,” Hannah said. “[As a professor] you’re almost trained to anticipate any technological difficulty.”

Some faculty members are still unsure which e-mail system works completely and continue to use their old e-mail accounts. The IT depart-ment encourages teachers to use their old accounts to access previous information and start using the new accounts to continue e-mail.

The files that have been lost will continue to migrate into the Ex-change accounts.

Blackout angers Metro professors

“Completely ridiculous. But don’t worry: no one will be held to account for this debacle.”

“I do not have classes this semester, because I am a department chair ... This is outrageous that we have not had ac-cess to e-mail for more than 10 days and there is no expected time of faculty get-ting their historical e-mail back, access to e-mail address books, and files on the system.”

“From what I’ve heard, this ‘had’ to be done right now, rather than on spring, winter or summer break. You don’t let your contractors dictate these time frames, you get another contractor to meet your needs.”

“I am still missing the e-mails from April 9-14.”

“The only reason my classes weren’t impacted to a greater degree is because I had in-class activities planned that didn’t rely on students accessing e-mail or MetroConnect. But, honestly, how does a campus of 21,000 students oper-ate without e-mail?“

“This screw-up goes way beyond mere inconvenience. It belies arrogance and incompetence at the highest ad-ministrative levels of the college. Profes-sional and personal reputations were compromised, to say the least, and it certainly doesn’t say much for the pro-fessionalism of the institution.

Having IT as one of 5 administrative divisions with V.P. status rather than as a service department, the case at other “preeminent” institutions, is outrageous. IT should be working for us to promote the educational activities of the college as defined by the faculty. As it stands, the faculty works for IT — to the detriment of our educational mission.”

“Although things are supposedly working now, there still seems to be a lot of issues. For example, I still get some new e-mail at the old MetroConnect (mail.mscd.edu) and some at the new Outlook.”

“I would love to share this: In the private sector, the person responsible for this fiasco would be fired.”

What question would you ask Metro’s Information Technology Division about the e-mail and MetroConnect outages?

“Why can’t we access the e-mails we received and

sent?”Andrew Sloan

Metro Junior

“Why in the world would you have done it before

finals?”Leslie Boggess

Metro Senior

“Why wasn’t there a mes-sage warning students

to back-up important documents before the

upgrade?”Brian Hovan

Metro Sophomore

“Why were all past stu-dent e-mails deleted?”

Robert NievesMetro Junior

“Did students receive any of the e-mails I sent out? I’m wondering because I haven’t heard back from

anyone.”Mohamed SaeedMetro Freshman

“Why the hell do they do something they say will

take two days to com-plete when nothing they ever do gets done in two

days?”Jon Daniels

Metro Senior

“Couldn’t we have just staggered the transition

to Google over the last three months?”

L.T. CervantesMetro Freshman

On a scale of 1-5, how much has the entire IT outage affected your classroom? (5 being the most)

Last week, how much time was lost in your class due to the extended IT outage?

87 responses

“IT came around on an ad hoc basis to help faculty log in, but they can only catch a fraction of the faculty.”

“I am still not able to e-mail my stu-dents ... On the other hand, the fellow from IT who came to help us set up our new accounts was very apologetic and helped as best he could.”

Did you receive additional information from IT or the administration about the extended outage?

Total number of faculty surveyed: 104Total number of faculty e-mailed: 425For more results, visit themet.metrostudentmedia.com/news

101 responses 104 responses

Students respond