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IT burden placed on students
By Matthew Quane
mquane@mscd.edu

On Oct. 18, Microsoft released the latest version of its seemingly inescapable web browser, Internet Explorer. As a result, any Metro students or faculty members who made the upgrade have been left high and dry in regards to home access to their MetroConnect accounts.

This is an egregious display of shortsightedness on the part of what is supposed to be one of the most forward-thinking and progressive departments at Metro, Information Technology.

Microsoft released a public beta of Internet Explorer 7.0 in January, which should have sufficed as warning to the IT department that the in-line frames MetroConnect so relies on would lead to problems.

Metro IT cannot expect the student body to be prepared to prevent automatic Microsoft updates, especially updates to a program as critical to the computing experience as a web browser.

Instead, IT says the fault of the matter lies with Microsoft, and students will be responsible for not mangling their access to the school’s intranet.

“Microsoft is the ruler of the world for technology,” said George Middlemist, interim vice president of Information Technology at Metro.

Even if that’s true, it is not a valid reason for IT to play possum while the students deal with the problem.

The only fail-safe way for students to retain access to MetroConnect while using Internet Explorer is to repeatedly reject automatic updates, assuring the purity of their web browser. However, these rejections also restrict access to important security updates from Microsoft.

It is a lazy move on the part of IT to lay the fault for the problem on Microsoft and the responsibility for the solution upon Metro students.

Use of MetroConnect is vital for Metro students. Not only is it the only way to access Metro e-mail, but it is also the primary method of registering for classes. A student unable to register is not a student.

It is the responsibility of IT to make Metro’s services available to the widest possible range of users – many of whom use different web browsers for their Internet surfing. Mozilla just released an update of its web browser, Firefox 2.0, which is perfectly compatible with Metro’s e-mail system. Safari, the default browser provided on Apple computers, is also compatible.

So thanks for all the help, IT. Thanks for the late warning – your Oct. 27 MetroConnect message came nine days too late for students who automatically updated. Not to mention that those who updated were already left out in the cold, barren nether-regions of the Internet.

This Internet Explorer fiasco could have served as a perfect opportunity for Metro’s IT department to make a stand against the Microsoft monolith by encouraging support for more secure, independent web browsers, such as Firefox.

Unfortunately, such a changeover would have been better implemented back in January, when this problem first arose. It is too late now to help accustom the computer-illiterate portion of the student body to an unknown, though debatably superior, software alternative.