UNM Students and staff are growing accustomed to the updated e-mail system, even if they are disinclined to the sudden change.
A forum, scheduled for Wednesday in Hokona Theater, will provide students and staff an outlet to voice their problems and suggestions about the e-mail system. UNM Information Technologies is hosting four more forums throughout February and March.
Moira Gerety, IT spokeswoman, said the department is receptive to concerns about the UNM e-mail system.
“We are really going to talk about what your problems are,” Gerety said. “We want to listen to what the campus is saying. We want to know how students use e-mail. We are hearing that people are interested in having a single e-mail system that faculty, staff and students can collaborate on.”
UNM“We intend to replace just about everything we have (in the) system that everyone will use,” she said.
Gerety said it‘s important for students to come to the open forums to ensure their voice is heard on this matter. A survey will be e-mailed to students for their input if they can’t make it to the forum.
Student Dayra Fallad said the revised e-mail system didn’t transfer her address book. She said her other concerns were that the system is too slow, confusing and logs users out too quickly.
“I am part of a lot of student organizations and all of my work e-mail goes to my UNM e-mail, so it is my primary e-mail, and I lost all my e-mail groups during the transition,” Fallad said. “I miss the old interface. It was convenient, easy to use and the new e-mail is not user friendly.”
Gerety said that after UNM upgraded its banner system that some UNM systems are based on — including MyUNM and LoboWeb — it became evident that the system vendor, SunGuard, could not support the e-mail system. UNM was forced to change the interface of its e-mail service to the web portal system to remain up to date with SunGuard development.
“The (MyUNM) portal has been more designed to handle transactions between students and administration,” Gerety said. “The e-mail that was being used on the portal for MyUNM was interfering with the performance of the portal itself.”
Gerety said the change will ensure LoboWeb doesn’t crash during peak times, like when students are registering for classes.
“Students couldn’t even access their Bursar’s account because the e-mail was down,” she said.
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The interface change also gave users a more consistent experience, as some users used the Web portal and some used MyUNM to access e-mail.
Some problems still persist with the system.
“With the new one, for some reason, the e-mail shows the oldest message (first),” Fallad said. “I have messages from 2006 and I have to wait for it to upload my new e-mails.”
Freshman Chris Doyle said he didn’t mind the change to a new system.
“E-mail is e-mail,” he said. “I felt the old one wasn’t very good. The icons were confusing. Sometimes you could click the wrong icon and get sent to the wrong link.”
Fallad said she didn’t understand why the e-mail change had to happen in the middle of the semester, but she does like a couple of the new e-mail features.
“What I do like about the new feature is that it automatically saves,” she said. “But I would definitely clean it up a bit and make it more user friendly.
