Bryn Mawr College

As always, Winter Break is a good time to correct issues and improve services without impacting classes.  In light of this, Virtual Bryn Mawr (PeopleSoft) services will be unavailable tonight ( Monday, January 11 ) from 5:00 pm until approximately 11:30 pm in order to perform maintenance. If this outage presents a major problem, please contact David Sturgis or the Help Desk immediately.

We are monitoring a performance issue on the Communications Center (Webmail) server since our upgrade on Friday evening. This issue is intermittent and primarily presents itself as slowness searching the address book (including autocomplete), and sending email or calendar invitations.  This type of problem can become apparent only under full load, so it did not manifest itself during our extensive testing process over the past few weeks. We are working closely with the vendor to promptly identify a solution. Please be aware that in order to resolve this issue and improve overall performance, an outage similar to the one which ... Read more»

Communication Center is now back up and all email, calendars, etc. should now be accessible. We're still completing some final testing, but no problems have been encountered in testing since the system came back online at about 7:45. Should you experience a problem, please call or email the Help Desk (x7440, help@brynmawr.edu). A list of new and improved features is available here.  New and updated documentation is available at the TECHBar Documentation Blog. Here are a few highlights: Introducing the Briefcase The Briefcase application is used to save files directly to your “webmail" account, making it easy to access these files ... Read more»

Just a quick reminder that there is a planned upgrade this evening for the Bryn Mawr Communication Center (Webmail) which will affect all email access. You will be unable to send email or access the Communication Center. Received emails will not be available until a after the upgrade is complete, and may not arrive immediately as it sometimes takes time for all emails to be delivered. Mobile Devices and Mail/Calendar clients will not be able to contact the server during this period. We expect to be back up and running very early Saturday morning.  Watch the IS Blog for status.

Thank you for your patience.  Virtual Bryn Mawr is now available once again. David Sturgis would like to remind those who may have submitted process scheduler requests this morning that those will need to be resubmitted.

At this time we are experiencing an outage for Virtual Bryn Mawr (aka Virtual Registrar, PeopleSoft, virtual.brynmawr.edu).  One of the related servers has experienced an unexpected problem, which is currently being addressed.  We expect that this will resolved shortly; please bear with us as we work to resolve the problem.

Just a quick reminder that on January 8-9, Information Services will upgrade the College Communications Center (aka Webmail) to Zimbra version 6. The upgrade will start at approximately 5pm on Friday the 8th and extend into the evening with the intention of being fully up and running early Saturday morning.  Status updates will be posted here on the IS blog and can also be found in the right-hand column of the main Computing Web page.  Please keep in mind that while you may be able to log into the upgraded system before it is announced, testing may still ... Read more»

As we announced in October, IS is in the process of upgrading and augmenting the wireless infrastructure around campus with the 3-year goal of virtually complete campus coverage. We previously reported that the new wireless devices had been deployed in a number of buildings including Guild, Canaday, Dalton, and Goodhart.  Since that time, Carpenter, Thomas, Taylor and Brecon have also received the new wireless technology, adding wireless to new locations, and reaching out to our first residence hall.  Over Winter Break, we anticipate  that Erdman will have wireless added throughout the building, and other buildings will be added through the academic ... Read more»

On January 8-9, 2010, Information Services will upgrade the College Communications Center (aka Webmail) to Zimbra 6. Zimbra 6 offers a variety of new features and improvements including many requested by members of our community. More information and sneak peek opportunities will be available over the next couple of months as we prepare for this upgrade. For a quick look at some of the highlights, go to http://www.zimbra.com/products/whats_new.html If you have any questions about the upgrade, please contact the Help Desk at 610-526-7440 or help@brynmawr.edu .

Earlier this week, we posted about a problem some individuals were having with opening Word, printing, and a few other issues. After much investigation, the problem was tracked to a particular server which was behaving irregularly and causing computers to react irregularly when communicating with it.  The problem has now been resolved;  everyone who reported having this problem has been contacted and is able to work normally.  We do not expect that it will reoccur.  The issue with the affected server was a software malfunction. If you are experiencing problems with your computer, please let us know as your issue may not ... Read more»

Some community members have been experiencing computer troubles in the past few days.  It may appear as: Unable to open Word, or severe delay opening Word Unable to print, severely delayed printing, or hanging when trying to print to some models of HP printers (4250, 4350, 4200, 4700, 2015, etc.) from any program. At this time, we have tracked this to a problem specifically with these printer models in our environment, and we are working with HP to resolve the problem.  We have been unable to identify a specific update or change which caused this to occur; at this time, it does not ... Read more»

It has been brought to our attention that not all of the public printers were defaulting properly to duplex (double-sided) printing.  The reason for this has been identified, and we expect that as of tomorrow this will work properly.  If you continue to have problems with duplex printing, please let the Help Desk know (help@brynmawr.edu, x7440) as soon as possible.