You’ve Got Mail
In the early hours of Feb. 25, the myCATS email system crashed leaving it completely inaccessible to students.
Information Technology was expecting the Ecats system to become unusable at some point in the near future, but the crash came as a surprise, according to Interim Chief Information Officer Ed Boyd.
The problem stemmed from the way the Ecats system stored messages.
“All the messages would be in a huge database, and there was a table that would tell the software,” Boyd said. “But what happened is that the table got corrupted, so we still have the messages, we just don’t know right now where they go.”
Fortunately, according to Boyd, IT had been preparing to replace Ecats since last Fall.
“We tested out things like Google Apps and Microsoft’s Live@edu, and we talked to SGA about it, to get their input, since they represent the student body.”
In the end, IT settled on Google Apps, which provides students with a version of Google’s popular Gmail service, as well as certain other Google products such as Google Documents.
After the crash, IT began a frantic effort to create the individual student accounts — all while moving their offices out of the soon-to-be-renovated second floor of Chappell Hall.
The new service would need accounts for all current students, all potential students who have been accepted, and all students who graduated in 2009 or 2010. IT’s goal was to get the approximate 8,000 and 9,000 new accounts entered into the system, by Monday, Feb. 28.
Students were appreciative of the hard work and happy to have an email account by Monday.
“It (the new email system) was up by Monday which was nice because that is when we started class again,” sophomore mass communication major Khristy Marion said, “But it was annoying over the weekend because I didn’t know what was going on because I didn’t know if it was just my email or if it was everyone’s.”
Though the new email accounts were available on Monday, the emails that were in the old accounts were not available in the new inboxes.
“The worst part was that they weren’t able to recover the emails because I had sent a lot of important things to myself,” sophomore early childhood education major Brittanyanne Cahill said.
In addition to the email changes, IT is continuing to try and fix the PAWS system found in myCATS.
On Dec. 20, PAWS, the electronic system students access for services including registration, financial aid and records, went offline for a software update. In emails sent out to students beforehand, university officials suggested that the upgrade would be complete by Dec. 23. But, IT ran into an unexpected problem.
“MyCATS and PAWS run using two different software programs, although they’re made by the same company,” Boyd said. “And we needed to update the software running PAWS, so we took the opportunity of the winter holidays for that, since it would require downtime.”
However, when they began to install the upgrade, they found that the updated software for PAWS was not fully compatible with the software for myCATS.
“The upgrade itself went fine,” Boyd said. “Except that the single sign-in functionality for myCATS did not work with PAWS.”
Instead, IT set up a separate sign-in page to allow access to PAWS until they can remedy the problem.
According to Boyd, the latest version of the software that powers myCATS is compatible with the software running PAWS, but it would be a major upgrade. IT plans to conduct the upgrade, but there is currently no definite timetable for completion of the project.
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