New e-mail upgrades expand storage space

Author: Lea Calderon-Guthe

Starting March 7, students, faculty and staff may have noticed a change in the appearance of the Webmail interface along with an increase in mailbox size. Middlebury's Library and Information Services (LIS) department recently upgraded the College's e-mail system from Microsoft Exchange 2003 to Microsoft Exchange 2007 while simultaneously moving from a 32-bit to a 64-bit platform.

The platform change came as a routine hardware replacement, as the previous e-mail servers were four years old. In the process of replacing them, the LIS department decided to upgrade them as well.

"The database being 64-bit makes it much more reliable and robust than a 32-bit platform," said Rick James, manager of Central Systems and Lab Support.

Most hardware on campus is on a three- to four-year upgrade rotation, from the desktops in the computer labs and the library to the heavy-duty servers in the four computer rooms on campus, two in the basement of Voter Hall, one in Carr Hall and one in the library.

"Considering the hardware, it's always best to replace ahead of time, to keep that on a cycle so you don't have any kind of mechanical problems," said Carol Peddie, associate dean of Library and Information Services. "As computers age, they tend to go out of warranty and start to fail, so we like to try to keep up with all the hardware on campus."

The main benefit of upgrading the e-mail servers is the additional space. The default mail quota per person increased tenfold, going from 50 megabytes to 500 for students and 100 megabytes to one gigabyte for faculty and staff.

Software upgrades are no less important than those in the hardware arena, so as LIS moved the e-mail databases over to their new servers, they also upgraded the e-mail client to Microsoft Exchange 2007. Switching to the new servers meant e-mail services would have to be temporarily unavailable anyway, so it was an ideal time to also install the most recent software. Area Director Tom Cutter cited the importance of keeping up to date software-wise.

"[Exchange] 2003 support will be discontinued at some point, so we have to stay current with Microsoft's roadmap for e-mail," Cutter said.

Though Microsoft Exchange 2007 was released last fall and the College did not upgrade until this spring, updating the software in this manner was in perfect accordance with the College's usual routine. Newer versions of the software the College currently uses may be released, but LIS will not consider an upgrade until the service pack accompanying the new software becomes available. The benefits of upgrading the e-mail system deal mostly with the extra storage space, but James cited Microsoft Exchange 2007 as having increased capabilities as an e-mail client, so the software upgrade did provide additional advantages.

"In 2000 the Webmail interface and the full Outlook client were very different," James said. "[Exchange] 2003 brought that closer, and [Exchange 2007] is even closer than before. There will be a very common look and feel between the full Outlook version and Webmail - we think that's important."

Naomi Berkins '11 was not sure she agreed with James' assertion when she first experienced the new Webmail interface.

"At first I was kind of annoyed because I liked seeing everything at once, but now that everything is separated by date, it's kind of nice that you know when you got it," Berkins said.

Cutter hopes more students will share Berkins' outlook on the new Outlook-like appearance.

"Obviously we're trying to make things better and add more functionality, we're not trying to take anything away," Cutter said

While the change in the appearance of Webmail has made little impact on students, the extra storage space has been generally appreciated.

"I like the extra space we have for sending and receiving things because I hated getting those little reminders that my mailbox was too full," Berkins said.