Slippery Rock students have had mixed emotions about the new Rockmail system that updated during the summer.
Henry Magusiak, enterprise applications director of the university’s IATS, said the Rockmail system was updated because the old system was outdated in regards to email platforms.
He said the current email system is under what is considered the extended support phase from Microsoft, which will still deliver security patches only for the platform.
“Anytime I submitted homework to the dropbox on D2L, I would never get an email confirmation on Rockmail, which resulted in a lot of problems for me,” Mark McGinn, a freshman Information Systems major, said.
“We are aware of the ongoing active sync issue with the current Exchange 2013 environment and continue to work with the vendor to resolve,” Magusiak said. “We believe that most of the problems stem from the mixed environment that is currently deployed which is a mix of Exchange 2007/2013 servers.”
The problems are expected to be resolved when the servers are all switched over to 2013.
“The movement of all staff and faculty to the Exchange 2013 environment along with the transition of all student email to the Office 365 cloud version will enhance functionality and reliability.” Magusiak explained.
According to Magusiak, goals of the summer update included updated storage capacity of mailboxes, updated look and feel, resilience toward hardware failures, and the integration of Office 365.
“Office 365 will be installed Christmas break,” Magusiak said. “Following installation, a pilot group of students will test the functionality of the new email system.”
Magusiak said that it is very important to keep your account secure and never share your password.
He also mentioned how important it is to pay attention to spam emails, as the number of phishing attacks have increased dramatically over the last few years. .
“You must really be aware that any email that has a web link that is requesting information about your SRU account/password that does not have “sru.edu” or “passhe.edu” at the end of the website should be treated with extreme caution,” Magusiak said. “The groups who then possess this information attack our email servers and use them to send out email all over the world which causes production email issues.
