Paul’s Blog

Okay.. so things didn’t go well on campus.  I spent several weeks researching and testing a new layout for our webmail users on campus.  It has all the features of services like GMail, and Yahoo Mail (including auto-completing addresses from your address book, drag and dropping of mail, encrypted mail, a new interface to filter your mail, and a lot more).  It was very well received in testing (from around 20-30 people including technical and non-technical people).  The problem is – when launched… the thing was incredibly slow.  Its hard to simulate the load several thousand students, faculty, and staff will put on a production system.  Hopefully after a hardware/OS upgrade some time next year we’ll be able to recommend it again for our users.  For now though, Mea Culpa, Mea Culpa, Mea Maxima Culpa.