Technology Advisory: Email Server Upgrade, Friday June 20

Filed under Technology
Posted by , June 17, 2008
View all posts for June 2008

Email Upgrade

Beginning this Friday, June 20, at 9 p.m., Technology will begin to replace Simmons’ email infrastructure, upgrading server hardware and software.

From 9 p.m. to 10 p.m., on Friday, all email stored on the server, including incoming and sent email, will be unavailable as the email server is replaced. Webmail will also be unavailable. Email may still be sent from desktop clients using Simmons servers, and all messages arriving at this time will be stored for delivery when the servers come back online.
At 10pm, access to new email and newly sent mail, will resume. At this time we will begin to copy mail for server folders, including Inboxes, from the old to new servers. Your mail from server folders may not be completely copied until Sunday evening, June 22. During this time, new email will arrive in Inboxes, and email may be sent from Simmons servers.

On Friday, at 10 p.m., an upgraded version of Simmons’ webmail client will be available. This version will support setting of forwarding addresses and vacation messages. As a result, these options will be removed from Simmons Preferences site, http://preferences.simmons.edu. The new Preferences site will still be used for changing your Simmons password and setting your spam filter level.
The upgraded webmail client will take advantage of the new Simmons Central Authentication (SCA) single-sign-on, in preparation for the new mySimmons Portal being released later this summer. Once logged in, in addition to webmail, you will be authenticated to other Simmons web services, which at this time include Simmons Blogs (http://blogs.simmons.edu) and iTunesU (http://itunes.simmons.edu). It is important to note that once authenticated via SCA, you must quit your browser when you are done to ensure that your are no longer logged in to any Simmons web services. In the future, most Simmons web services will employ SCA.