Changes

In a week or so Over the next few days Computer Support Services staff will announce be performing upgrades on our core data storage systems. There should be no service outages related to this work, but with work of this kind there is always the availability possibility of the Office 2007 upgradean unforeseen problem resulting in an outage. There are some things to check before introducing it into your department's software ecology <br><br>1Friday morning, July 31st, we will upgrade the main disk storage system for critical services such as the main web pages, First Class, and other applications. If you have commercial software which interacts with Office you should seek assurance about compatibility with Office 2007 before your department goes through the The upgrade. If you have automation developed in house you should contact not interupt the Help Desk about how you can test it with Office 2007 functioning of those systems and assure yourself that it will we do not be broken by the upgradeanticipate any downtime.<br><br>2. Get trained on Monday and Tuesday morning we will be physically moving the new look servers that host many critical and menu structurenon-critical services. The May Word, Excel and Powerpoint workshops Services running on those servers will be repeated in August. Or earlier if there is enough interest. Call Melissa James x5543 in Lifelong Learning and get on reassigned to other hardware during the list. 3. Encourage all users you share Office files move with to install no downtime for the compatibility patch so that different versions of Office will read each other's filesservices involved. See http://techhelp.mcla.edu/converter. Several administrative offices have special purpose software packages that are crucial to the service they deliver. Major ones, such as Raiser(Email me if you's Edge re interested in Alumni/Development or HRCMS in Personnel have large companies behind them which can be queried about issues how that may arise when using them with Office 2007 software or documentsworks). Computer Support Services has contacted several offices with those that we are aware of and we have already started to identify where problems may exist <br><br>These upgrades and where the upgrade relocations will not create an issuetake us a big step forward towards our goal of complete redundancy for all systems. There We are other cases working towards a world where critical systems will continue to function in which Computer Support may not be aware the face of such critical software major hardware failures or in which even the "software" may be loss of an Excel spread sheet entire building to fire or Access database that was developed in houseother calamity. In these cases <br><br>We appreciate your support as we have work to depend on department staff to identify the potential provide reliable and robust information technology systems for trouble. Clearly, you do not want to do an Office upgrade that will prevent you from using your accounting systemMCLA.<br><br>-Mark Berman