By Donna Fowler

No one thought the switch to MSU Denver’s new email address and the launch of the new portal, ConnectU, would go off without a hitch. However, neither did they expect some of the more obscure problems that surfaced once the changeovers were made on Aug. 6.

According to Mike Hart, director of security and networking, in the first 13 days of the conversion the Help Desk answered more than 9,000 calls.

“The whole team worked very hard to resolve everyone’s issues as quickly as possible, and Help Desk calls have dropped off significantly,” says Chief Information Officer James Lyall.

Nevertheless, some problems are continuing while others have been fixed.

MyCourses
The email function within MyCourses continues to experience an intermittent problem. Faculty are having trouble sending information to their classes and students are unable to send emails to their professors.

“The good news is that it’s sporadic,” says Hart. “But that is making it somewhat harder to fix. The bad news is that anytime faculty and their students can’t communicate, it’s a huge issue.”

Just like when your car won’t make that weird noise for the mechanic so it’s nearly impossible for him to pinpoint the problem, the sporadic nature of the messaging function has made it difficult to hone in on the exact problem.

The issue is receiving the highest priority from the vendor, Hart says. Test user accounts have been created and messages are being sent back and forth in an attempt to replicate the error.

Says Hart: “On Friday we could only replicate one error, so it’s hard to locate the source of the problem. It will continue to be a huge priority until it’s solved.”

Student email
The student email problem is that messages sent from a “do-not-reply” email address—which most of MSU Denver’s email to students are— were being filtered by Google as spam or junk mail and unseen by students.

Hart explains that the root of the problem was that the migration from the mscd.edu environment to the MSUDenver.edu Google environment resulted in different filtering rules being applied by Google.

After revisiting all of the spam filters and e-mail settings, the University’s and Google’s, the technology services team believes the problem is fixed. “We haven’t had this come up as a continuing issue in our team meetings.”

Student accounts
Hart says the problem with passwords that students were having has been fixed.

“Not all student accounts were synchronized with Windows for their passwords, but some were, so it took a bit for us to find and correct the problem,” he says. “I don’t expect any more password Help Desk calls, except for the usual instances where someone can’t remember their password.”

Wrong email icon
Technology services is still investigating why people are getting the wrong email icon in ConnectU: students getting Outlook instead of Gmail and vice versa for faculty and staff.

If this issue is experienced, Hart recommends that faculty and staff go directly to mail.msudenver.edu to access e-mail.

Metro Connect vs. ConnectU
One problem that is going to depend on users to end is using ConnectU, not MetroConnect.

“We’ve found that some students, staff and faculty are logging in to MetroConnect because of shortcuts, favorites and such,” Hart says. “But MetroConnect doesn’t have the same functionality since it was archived. Everyone needs to use ConnectU.”

Finally, Hart asks that if you’ve encountered something different than what is on the above list, please contact the Help Desk.

“It’s taken us awhile to get a handle on all the issues that have come up and there could be more. We encourage any students, faculty and staff to contact us if they’re having a problem,” says Lyall.