MyCATS ups email loads, talks future

     Professors will no longer have to tell their students to “clean out” their myCATS e-mail inboxes because of e-mails bouncing back. The e-mail storage has significantly increased since spring break.
     According to an e-mail sent out to students via the Student  Digest by Dr. Donald L. Steward, chief information officer and executive director of Information Technology and Marketing  Department, “I have taken steps to address the issue raised by the majority of survey respondents by increasing the size of the individual student e-mail boxes from 10MB to 100MB and the maximum attachment size from 1MB to 50MB. For faculty and staff, we raised the e-mail box size to 3GB and the maximum attachment size to 100MB.”
     Steward’s e-mail also reported that the myCATS portal for groups’ and classes’ limits were raised to the effect that combined disk space has increased from 12MB to 22MB, as well as single file uploads space (1MB to 20MB) and single photo uploads from 1MB to 5MB.
     “One of the reasons that we had such low storage accounts was that there were unused and inactive email accounts for alumni who (hadn’t) been here for a long time, and none of them were being pushed away,” Ryan Greene, president of SGA, said.
     The challenge came in deciding what to do with the inactive accounts, which were taking up needed server space.
     The Information Technology and Marketing Department is still waiting to hear from the Registrar as to whether or not to delete the nearly 3,000 inactive alumni accounts.
     According to Greene, Steward recommends that accounts, both active and inactive, be terminated 365 days upon graduation. While this has not yet been voted on by SGA, the plan includes reminders being sent to accounts prior to termination, as a way to alert and remind people to seek other email services.
     There are several reasons SGA feels that this recommendation is important.
     “Student dollars were going toward updating and keeping up with the email account so alumni that aren’t really paying their fees anymore shouldn’t necessarily get the service of an email account,” Greene said. “The second was probably the important one was that if it’s taking up space, there’s really no point in having an inactive account.
     Steward stressed that “Just because we (terminate) an e-mail account doesn’t mean your student records will disappear. The  student systems will create a name for you.”

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Apr 11 2008. Filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry