-tictech message:
Greetings tictech people.
Thank you Janine Magidman for sharing your positive experience with the IS
department's OWA training. If a school has 10 or more students, Rick Henry
is willing to teach the course at the school, even on weekends or after
hours if that works best for the school.
I would like to take this opportunity to let everyone know that IS staff
take all calls to the Help Desk very seriously. We utilize special software
and hardware (called an automated call distribution system, or ACD) to
queue, route and track all calls. Our records indicate that for a very
short period on Jan 30th we had only one person handling calls to the Help
Desk. While she was handling a call, other callers would have received two
recorded greetings, two short pauses, and then would have been forwarded to
voicemail, all within less than 3 minutes. There were no voicemail
messages, so if anyone was on hold for more than 3 minutes please let us
know because that would indicate a problem with the ACD. We always try to
answer all calls immediately, but with the high number of calls, the length
of some calls, scheduled and un-scheduled breaks, etc we are forced to route
some calls to voicemail. However, these are always retrieved as soon as
possible.
We have experienced some unexplained problems with the OWA servers. We are
installing special tools to help us monitor and debug the problems. I don't
believe there is a problem with capacity -- I frequently use OWA at home and
have not experienced any problems first-hand.
Thanks for your calls and emails. Your input is invaluable to us in our
effort to provide reliable technology systems and services.
John Rowlands
Director, Information Services
Seattle School District
(206) 252-0320
jrowlands@seattleschools.org
-----Original Message-----
From: Mark Ahlness [mailto:mahlness@cks.ssd.k12.wa.us]
Sent: Thursday, January 31, 2002 3:58 PM
To: tictech@learningspace.org
Subject: tictech: OWA training flop
-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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