E-mail & Calendar News Archive
This page is an archive of any changes made to the infrastructure that have benefit to or might impact the university community.
ITS is taking steps to improve the security of Western's email system. Email clients on Western's wireless network will soon be required to authenticate when sending email.The technical reason for this change is to allow us to more easily apply policy to email traffic from the "uwosecure" wireless network. This change to require authentication when sending mail will allow us to throttle or temporarily suspend outbound emails on a per-user basis.
We have identified email messages sent from individuals email address over a Western wireless session in the past month. We will be contacting these users in multiple stages. In order to maintain you email client's ability to send email, a minor configuration change is required. In general, your client's outbound SMTP server settings must be configured to: use SSL or TLS; and enable username+password authentication. If you neglect to make this change, your ability to receive and read email will not be affected, however you will be unable to send mail until your client is reconfigured.
Our current target date for this change is July 9th. If you wish to reconfigure your wireless device's email clients on your own, please follow the instructions for your client at: http://www.uwo.ca/its/doc/hdi/email/secure.html. Otherwise, please wait for ITS On-site to contact you for assistance. Any clients on the wireless network which fail to make the appropriate configuration changes by this date will still be able to receive and read their email, but will receive the following error message when trying to send mail until their client configuration is updated:
530 5.7.0 No AUTH command has been given.
If you have any questions or concerns, please contact the ITS Helpdesk: http://www.uwo.ca/its/helpdesk/
ITS is taking steps to improve the security of Western's email system. We will be implementing a limit on the rate at which messages can be sent to external email addresses. This change will mitigate the impact of compromised hosts or accounts on our email system. For a full technical explanation of this change, including rationale and workarounds, please see: http://www.uwo.ca/its/email/ratelimits.html
There may also be an impact to a small number of hosts which send large volumes of legitimate email messages. We are sending targeted communications to the owners of hosts which we believe fit this category, based on previous email activity. This change will come into effect on June 25th.
If you have any questions or concerns about how this may affect you or users in your departments, please let us know.
Just a quick note to let you know that our Calendar server upgrade is complete. While details can be found at http://www.uwo.ca/its/email/calendar.html we want to highlight a few of the points covered within this link:
- As we indicated in our early communications, most of the data migrated successfully. We will be reaching out to individuals to assist with the few events that did not migrate.
- There are changes that are required by your calendar programs e.g. Lightning and Outlook Connector before it will work with the new version of the calendar.
- A read only version of the old calendar is available for reference purposes only at https://iwc.uwo.ca:8443/iwc_static/layout/login-uwo.html
- If you use Notify Link you should have received a separate email with instructions. If you use Notify Link on more than one device please take special note of the instructions provided in the email specifically targeted to this second device.
We want to thank everyone for your cooperation during this upgrade process. If you have any questions or concerns please contact your local IT support, the ITS HelpDesk or the project team directly at WesternCalendarUpgrade@uwo.ca
The limitation on sending .rar and .zip attachments have been relaxed. Members of the university community can now send these attachment types to each other and to external recipients. External senders should still be refer to the "How does this affect me?" for additional information.
Further to our initial communication Western
Calendar Server Upgrade, the date of the upgrade has been set for the
weekend of May 25, 2012. Most of the calendar content will migrate successfully. However, there are a few
events in individuals calendars that will not migrate without some assistance. To be clear
this is not a reflection of bad or corrupt data.
Whenever running migration tools there are bound to be exceptions.
This is especially true because as part of the calendar upgrade there are
significant changes being made to the calendar.
In our analysis of the
data we found a correlation with calendar migration errors and historical
calendar content. Therefore, our current plan of action is to fix the
migration errors on any future events only. Some of these fixes we will be
able to do for individuals before to the migration. For those events we cannot fix
ahead of
time, we will be providing recommendations and documentation to follow post
migration. We
will be providing access to the old calendar server for up to 6 months after the
upgrade. This will provide everyone with the ability to reference any past
events that are not being migrated because of errors. Details on how
to access this read only version of the old calendar will be provided closer to
the actual migration.
If
you would like additional details please contact WesternCalendarUpgrade@uwo.ca.
In preparation for the upgrade we have a new version of the connector that supports the current and future calendar server infrastructure.
We ask that you upgrade now to allow the calendar project team to focus their time towards the migration effort in the coming months. Please go to http://www.uwo.ca/its/doc/hdi/calendar/outlook.html and select ‘Upgrade [click here]’ for additional instructions. There will be another configuration change that will be required in order to access the new calendar environment, effective May 25, 2012. This information is outlined off of http://www.uwo.ca/its/doc/hdi/calendar/outlook-troubleshooting.html under the subheading, Update the Calendar Server.
Western is embarking on an exciting new project to upgrade our corporate calendar system for the start of the 2012 fall term. The calendar content that we are making reference to is currently accessed using the following programs:
- Convergence, Western’s web mail interface
- Connector (SJOC) that is a plug-in for Outlook
- Lightning that is an add-on for Thunderbird
- NotifyLink that is software for smart phones and tablets (available only for faculty and staff)
Upon completion of this project we will be able to provide the university community with increased selection when choosing a calendar program. You will be able to access your Western calendar from almost any calDAV compliant calendar program. The primary benefit will come to anyone running a Mac. You will be able to configure your iCal to access your Western calendar.
This is a significant upgrade that involves:
- Infrastructure changes, moving from a proprietary calendar protocol to what is emerging as the industry standard protocol for calendar systems – calDAV.
- The migration of 65, 000 calendars with the majority of usage coming from administrative units.
As part of the calendar upgrade the system will be unavailable for an extended period of time e.g. over a weekend, to facilitate the migration of data. To maximize the calendar availability a decision has been made to move only 18 months worth of historical calendar data. Access to this historical calendar data will be made available for reference purposes only after the upgrade.
We are working on making the transition to the new environment as seamless as possible from both the customer and technical support perspective. However, existing programs such as Lightning, Notifylink and Outlook Connector (SJOC) will need to be upgraded and/or reconfigured to access the new calendar environment.
Additional communication and details will be made available as the project progresses. If you would like to discuss how this project might impact you or the areas you support please contact WesternCalendarUpgrade@uwo.ca.
All production nodes are now running the latest version of Convergence. A list of improvements and bug fixes are as follows:
- Printing task lists in calendar
- Removing forward doesn't restore local delivery
- Printing emails splits across 3 pages in Firefox
- Auto-Bcc doesn't work on replies
- Check availability earlier/later buttons don't update end time
- Long email subjects distort message list
- "Message no longer exists" popup while editing drafts
- Improved browser support; IE 9, Safari 5 and Firefox 5
