Groupwise gets hardware check-up

By Matthew Meyerhofer

The problem that resulted in sporadic GroupWise e-mail outages last week may be corrected now, according to university administrators.

However, only time will tell if the corrections made to the system will be enough.

"It is believed the issue is now resolved, however the problem has been intermittent and we'll have to wait about a week to confirm [that]," said Todd Schmitzer, manager of Networking and Communications for Santa Clara's Information Technology (IT).

According to Carl Fussell, Director of IT, the problem was with the hardware that stores the GroupWise e-mail information; the software is only about a year old.

According to Fussell, the hardware vendor, Dell, sent specialists to the university to work on what has been baffling IT's administrators for weeks.

"Between some additional replacement hardware, and new low-level code being installed, the problem may be resolved," Fussell said.

"Testing has showed systems functioning as they should now."

Santa Clara has annual support agreements with vendors, so the repairs did not come as an added cost the university.

According to a log of technology updates from IT's Web site, there were at least three in late October and early November, which brought down the systems for diagnostic and repair.

Fussell said the issue will remain a top priority for IT until the bugs are completely ironed out for GroupWise.

"Everyone depends so heavily upon e-mail for communication these days; every appropriate resource at our disposal was applied. We had staff here well after midnight many nights, along with the vendor's personnel, working on the problem."

Contact Matthew Meyerhofer at (408) 554-4546 or at mmeyerhofer@scu.edu.