The Root Cause team in IT is tasked with finding the causes of significant IT issues that affect campus. In this news update we draw your attention to some of the problems being investigated or issues handled recently.
Increase in ‘SPAM’ email messages –The Division of IT currently uses multi-layered spam-filtering solutions, including Exchange Online Protection and Barracuda. Due the recent increase, we continue to adjust our spam-filtering systems to protect WCU email users from excessive spam. However, as the volume of spam rises, so does the chance that some unwanted items will squeeze through our filters to your WCU inbox. This is where we need you to ensure that you mark any such emails as spam so that they are reported back to Microsoft. This helps the software learn, evolve, and make better decisions moving forward, because spammers evolve just as often. Steps to assist in reporting messages that are not marked as SPAM can be found on the following site: Report Junk Email Messages .
Filtering email messages in an attempt to limit spam occasionally marks legitimate emails as suspicious. You will receive email notification for any emails that are quarantined by the Exchange Online Protection. To retrieve legitimate emails that have been quarantined, select Release to Inbox in the notification. This will release the email to your Inbox for review. After reviewing the email in your inbox, select Report as Not Junk to notify Microsoft who monitors and updates the filter parameters.
Access to SPSS and ARCGIS: Licensing expiration interrupted access to these specific software packages. IT staff worked with the different vendors in order to expedite the software and licensing certificate updates to restore access to the software applications.
Network Connectivity: Networking personnel are currently working to proactively replace and update the campus network equipment that will be obsolete and no longer supported in 2016. Staff personnel have worked after hours to replace the new routers and switches in order to limit or minimize any connectivity issues. Some brief outages have occurred which were dealt with in a timely manner with the assistance of a dedicated vendor support network specialist.
June 27-August 8, 2014 Global Problems: (Total 24) Accounts, Identity & Security: 1 Business Systems: 3 Email & Collaboration Tools: 2 Network, Internet & Phone Services: 9 Servers & Storage: 3 Services & Support: 1 Teaching, Learning and Research: 2 Web: 3
The Division of IT is committed to adopting a proactive, process-oriented approach to prevent problems before they arise. We will continue to keep you informed on our progress.