-tictech message:
Wednesday the 30th from 3:30 to 4:30 we held a workshop in our school
lab for Outlook Web Access (OWA). It was a disaster. I post the
description here in the hope someone can shed some light on what went
wrong.
There were 16 of us. Four had used OWA before, eight or nine had
accounts and wanted to log on for the first time. A few others filled
out apps for accounts at the gathering and were there to learn how to
use the program. One or two users were locked out. The information we
had on their account status was incorrect (I found this out the next
day). So this drove us all a little buggy, as you can imagine. But
once the new users got on, they were timed out almost immediately. They
could maybe read a message, close it, but read no more - had to log on
again. This happened over and over - to me and other long-time users as
well.
You can imagine what people thought about this. Great big build up,
telling the group how great it would be for them, the things they could
do, etc. Then, thud. We had someone on the phone to the help desk -
waited at least 15 minutes, never got through, finally gave up on that.
This morning the help desk info was that there was very slow internet
access on Wednesday, that folks were having timed out sessions on the
financial system (I think). Our Internet access was just fine all
afternoon, was fine during the OWA session as well. Our lab is Compaq
Pentium 266's, 64mb ram, running in a totally switched environment (one
AT switch gets you to the mdf).
We wondered where the problem was. The people running the training knew
what they were doing (me, Dave Wilkie, our U-Wired student). We
eventually assumed the problem was with OWA, or the server running it.
I don't know much about the program itself, but I am pretty sure the
upgrade that was supposed to happen last fall never came to pass.
Wondered if all the bugs were out. Then I wondered about our
environment. I also wondered about the OWA capacity for concurrent
users in a setting such as ours.... Many guesses, still no idea.
So, does anyone have any light to shed or similar experiences to share?
We need to get some definitive answers before we ever try this again -
that's if we can get the teachers to come back.... Thanks in advance -
Mark
Mark Ahlness
mahlness@cks.ssd.k12.wa.us
Arbor Heights Elementary School
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