Groupwise gets facelift
By Erin Ryan
Change is in the air at Santa Clara. A new front yard for Sobrato, a bigger and better Safeway and upgrades to Groupwise, the on-campus email network. As of this summer, email can be read, forwarded, composed, and sent on Version 6.0.2.
When Groupwise is up and running many students take it for granted and simply login, check their email, and logout. But when the system is down, as it was periodically for upgrades this summer and on Monday afternoon, it is frustrating for those trying to get a connection.
Ironically, the reason for the outages this summer was to prevent the system from going down in the future.
"The upgrades are to a stronger system so that more users can be active without it feeling overwhelmed and crashing," said Richard Serna, Technical Support Analyst at Information Technology (IT).
Perhaps the most noticeable change to the layperson was the different color and layout of the screen. IT is replacing everything old with newer, faster programs. But Serna said they are still in the process of transition. They've warned students to expect configuration or behavior changes.
Also with the upgrades, more options were added to Groupwise functioning.
Previous year's frustrations with forwarding email from an off-campus location should not be a problem now. Sending documents to entire groups should also be an easier process. And there is a new url, http://gw.scu.edu. The old address still works for now, but it will eventually be phased out. Still, Serna said that most of the changes were on the administrative end of operations.
Students were hesitant to get too excited about the upgrades to their email, considering the frustrations with Groupwise in the past.
Senior Dan Weeks said, "Groupwise has always been unreliable - I doubt that another upgrade is going to do much to help things. I couldn't check my email this summer, or class, or anything."
Senior Katie Jensen said, "My priority is getting my email, so if it works, then I'll be happy. But the upgrades don't look like they've changed or improved any of the functionality of Groupwise. The only other thing that makes me angry is that they cleared space for the new version by erasing the old mail from current students."
Other students choose not to deal with Groupwise at all. They keep an account with AOL, Hotmail or some other service. Senior Brooke Crawford said, "I've found that anytime I've considered going completely over to Groupwise, something goes wrong. So I'm glad I have AOL as my backup, especially this summer." But of course, there is another hassle of having an alternate email address because you might lose mail that has only been sent to the Groupwise account.
For now, students will just have to hope that the new features, improved reliability and improved performance that the new version of Groupwise has promised will be delivered.