Correspondence with Chancellor Crabtree and Mike McNeil regarding email concerns - January 2007 - Lou Gross --------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: FW: The silence of the emails Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 07:45:03 -0500 From: "lcrabtr1" To: "McNeil, Michael D" Cc: "Barlow, Denise D" , "Lou Gross" , "Holub, Robert Charles" Mike, I have been receiving a number of complaints about the e-mail service. The message below from Jim Fitzgerald, a very fine faculty member, is an example. It is urgent that we address these problems, even if the evidence is only ad hoc, and that you communicate to the faculty that IT is on top of the problems. I am sure you agree that a stable e-mail system is essential for communication in our flattened world. Loren Message from Professor James L. Fitzgerald (was attached) --------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: RE: The silence of the emails Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 08:29:41 -0500 From: "McNeil, Michael D" To: "lcrabtr1" Cc: "Barlow, Denise D" , "Lou Gross" , "Holub, Robert Charles" I appreciate you sending this complaint to me. I have heard there were some concerns and some people were complaining, but no one has commented to me until Denise asked about these issues yesterday. We are meeting this morning to determine if others in IT have heard complaints, what those complaints are, and what we can do to address them. I also am meeting with Gary Rogers today on the subject of e-mail, so I suspect he will have the same questions. We do understand the importance of e-mail and are committed to correcting these issues. However, we will likely need help from those experiencing the problems to focus on the right areas of e-mail so we can solve the problems quicker. Thanks you again, for your support of this project and your patience while we work to address the short-comings. I will send you an update on what we are doing later today. Mike ------------------------------------------------------------------------ mmcneil@tennessee.edu Re: The silence of the emails lcrabtr1@utk.edu,dbarlow@utk.edu,rholub@utk.edu Mike, Pardon my scepticism, but I have been getting complaints about emails issues for many months, and I have copies of correspondence from OIT staff that indicates they were well aware of the issues, not to mention having had personal conversations with Brice Bible about the problems several times including an entire meeting in his office devoted to this issue lest semester. For recent correspondence on this I am including below correspondence between Professor Gayle Baker to the Faculty Senate IT Committee (Brice is a member) as well as my response. This clearly points out that there have been MAJOR problems with email, OIT is well aware of them, Brice is aware of them, so to state that "no one has commented to me until Denise asked about these issues yesterday" frankly gives me very little confidence in the communication mechanisms within OIT. As one very minor point, I recently sent an email to our new Governors Chair, Jeremy Smith, using his netID from the lookup page at OIT - it bounced with the message: Recipient address rejected: No such user (jsmit199@utk.edu) We can't even get email to one of our premier faculty members (I used his ornl address to get to him). Cheers, Lou 1/12/07 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subject: RE: The silence of the emails Date: Fri, 12 Jan 2007 17:00:02 -0500 From: "McNeil, Michael D" To: "Lou Gross" Cc: "Barlow, Denise D" , "lcrabtr1" , "Holub, Robert Charles" I understand your skepticism. I do have pretty good knowledge on many of the issues you cite, but I was less informed on the impact of the e-mail delays and e-mail loss that is being reported recently. I realize that I need to do a better job of listening and searching out sources of information. I would like to work more closely with you on this project to better understand those things I might have missed and also to share the vision for this project beyond e-mail. I hope I can meet with you occasionally. I do need to point out that the recent "e-mail" issues with delays or loss are generally attributable to our SMTP service and not Exchange. I understand that they compose "e-mail" to the customers, any part that does not work right means that "e-mail" is not working right, and that we are still responsible. However, in this case those people not on Exchange are also experiencing the delays and/or loss. One of my people did some research of the Jeremy Smith e-mail problem. The problem is that even though he has a NetID, he does not have a UT e-mail account activated. We do not require faculty and staff to have a UT e-mail account, so we normally do not set one up unless it is requested. This is a long-term practice that we may need to revisit, but that is what happened in this case. Thanks and I look forward to speaking with you. Mike ------------------------------------------------------------------------ mmcneil@tennessee.edu RE: The silence of the emails dbarlow@utk.edu, lcrabtr1@utk.edu, rholub@utk.edu Mike, There is a formal process through the Faculty Senate Information Technology Committee (chaired by Marianne Breinig - mbreinig@utk.edu ) for OIT to obtain comments and assistance from the faculty on matters related to IT. Brice Bible has been a regular participant in this Committee and I encourage you to contact Marianne to keep abreast of faculty concerns as well as seek faculty input. As I see it there are two major problems facing OIT at this point regarding email, independent of how OIT is being managed or whether the control of this situation rests at the campus level (as the President indicated to me that it did at a meeting last Monday) or at the System level (since this entire transition was a System decision, making it work should not be be inflicted on the campus without adequate resources being provided to carry it out). I fully understand that the email process involves many other system components than simply Exchange, but it was the Exchange transition that drove all this and several faculty on this campus had made clear to Brice Bible, through several channels including the Senate, that we were quite skeptical about the entire transition process (and choice of product). 1. There has been significant damage done amongst faculty, staff and students concerning the willingness of OIT to provide timely information, deal with complaints, and communicate what is actually happening. As just one example other than all the email problems, the OIT Faculty Help Line has been removed. At no time did I ever receive a notice that this was happening, and when I called up I simply was told that combining the Faculty/Staff Help service with the Student Help one was more efficient. This may be true, but as there was no communication to the general faculty that this was happening, it sure appears to be a reduction in service (and Brice regularly noted to the Senate that OIT exists to provide service). 2. The technical ability of OIT to provide the services it is supposed to is now so much in doubt that several faculty have suggested simply stopping the Exchange transition and going back to the Solaris mail servers. These never had the level of problems that we have experienced with Exchange over the brief period of time it has been here. The Exchange transition was halted in the Fall, and there has been no information provided to the community as to why it is now appropriate to continue it. Brice had informed the Senate that only about 7000 of the total of about 35000 users had transitioned to Exchange at the time the transition was halted. What has happened to ensure that Exchange is now sufficiently stable to scale up the number of users by a factor of 5? If something has happened, why hasn't the community been informed? At what point do you stop the entire process and rethink it? From May - December there were 7 major problems with Exchange acknowledged by OIT (there may have been others not publically noted under OIT Events) as per Gayle Baker's summary, not counting the SMTP and other problems. I suggest that this is sufficient evidence of problems that time be spent rethinking the entire enterprise is now appropriate (by which I do not mean simply having another vendor/consultant come in with their goal being to try to sell you more product). I will be happy to meet with you to discuss these issues if you want, but while faculty can provide input on how to address these matters (and I have already suggested some individuals to the Chancellor as technically capable of providing input) it is the administration's responsibility to ensure this Research I institution has a reliable information infrastructure, including email. Cheers, Lou 1/14/07