GroupWise upgrades to improve e-mail system

By Troy Simpson

Information Technology (IT) said that major upgrades to the Santa Clara campus e-mail system are enhancing its efficiency and reliability, but that space limitations on individual accounts are necessary for the improvements to be permanent.

Hardware advancements include 25 new e-mail servers supporting approximately four terabytes (4,000 gigabytes) of disk storage.

"Everybody today communicates electronically," said Director of Technology and Communications Services Carl Fussell. "E-mail is a component of the electronic technology that everybody depends on to communicate."

Fussell said before the upgrade, reliability of GroupWise servers was inconsistent due to aging components and e-mail accounts with too many stored messages.

"There's no e-mail system out there that was designed to be a file storage tool," said Fussell. "They were designed as a communications tool, yet [using them for file storage] is convenient, so people have begun to use them for that."

Manager of Networking and Telecommunications Todd Schmitzer said that the aging servers were saturated with so many files that they could no longer function correctly.

Schmitzer said that the clogged e-mail system caused servers to crash, which often resulted in corrupted data and lost files in e-mail post offices. To avoid this problem in the future, IT implemented a limitation of approximately 50 megabytes of space per e-mail account.

"So far, we have not actually had an incident where a post office has failed once," said Schmitzer. "Before we did all the work in December we had post offices fail all the time because of the database corruption. We were always running out of space then."

Although mailbox crashes can still happen for other reasons, Schmitzer said they are less likely now because in the event of a server breakdown, new backup servers can take over and keep the affected post offices running.

Kathleen Maxwell, faculty director for the Alpha Residential Learning Community, said that the consistency and reliability of GroupWise is important because it allows her to keep students up to date with campus events and information.

"For me [GroupWise] is absolutely necessary," said Maxwell. "It's really a way of getting information to students very efficiently, and I can't think of a better way to do it."

Although many students believe that GroupWise makes contacting faculty and students on campus easy, some are unhappy with the new space limitations on e-mail accounts.

"I like the fact that we can look people up through the address book, but I don't think we should be limited to mailbox sizes because we get a lot of mail, and a lot of that mail comes from the school," said freshman Jessica Clee.

Previous inconsistencies in the system have caused some students to avoid using GroupWise as much as possible.

"I use it but I don't find it very reliable," said junior Jimmy Templeton. "Whenever I try to use it, I can't get into the system because they're doing some kind of work on it or they deleted all my e-mails and I can't get them until a couple weeks later. I'm starting to go away from that and begin using my Hotmail account for everything. I think [GroupWise] is definitely a valuable resource to have, but it's just not run well."