Older e-mails in the UCONNECT system have been moved to a temporary folder and will be deleted September 1 as the portal system goes through an upgrade, said Dr. Cynthia Rolfe, vice president for information technology.
Emails received before June 19 are now in the “Temporary Email” folder on the left folder in the e-mail center and users will need to be move messages they want to save to the e-mail inbox.
Instructions on where the old messages are and how to move them are available from UCONNECT under the Home tab.
“The system that UCONNECT sits on had an upgrade,” Rolfe said. “Any system that you have is going to have periodic updates for various reasons to add features, to improve on security or to fix security holes.”
“For most large systems like UCONNECT, if you don’t keep up to date, the vendor will not continue to support the product for you,” she said.
Planned upgrades to the system next year also made it necessary to upgrade UCONNECT in order for it to be able to read information from the new system, she said.
Brad Stitt, portal administrator, said this was the easiest way to upgrade the system, and that this way would let the students move e-mails at their discretion.
“If we had done it the way we initially wanted to, it would have probably taken about a week of down time to actually implement,” he said.
Besides what they have to do with the e-mail, this October upgrade is “back office”and students “won’t even know about it,” Mike Wood, IT director, said.
Unlike the October upgrade, the next version of UCONNECT due out next year will have significant changes in the look and feel of the product, not just behind the scenes, Rolfe said.
“We were the first university in the state to have a portal that allowed you to enroll online ... we were kind of ahead of the pack," Rolf said. "The downside to that is that we have a system that’s not as modern as some of the others that are out there.”
New upgrades or updates usually have a few bugs that the vendor has to clear out, Rolfe said, and that is why upgrades are not installed right away.
“We usually try to keep up with all of the latest versions within six months-ish of the release of the new version,” she said.
Rolfe said that they are always looking for student volunteers to test systems that they are updating or upgrading.
“We actually will give them a test login on the test system and let them look around,” she said.
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