More than 4,600 University students, staff and faculty will soon lose an old friend — their e-mail addresses.
User Services and Network Applications Director Joe St Sauver said 4,637 folks with “[email protected]” e-mail addresses will have to create an account on Darkwing or Gladstone. Old e-mail messages can
be transferred to the new account, as well.
Affected users have plenty of time to prepare for the change, which won’t take effect until fall 2004. University computing consultant Patrick Chinn said the early announcement will help provide a smooth transition, but he admitted many Oregon users might find the switch confusing.
“No matter how perfectly you plan things, there will always be rough spots,” Chinn said. “We’re going to end up having to help a lot of folks.”
The changes are due to the
retirement of a 15-year-old server which is the size of a commercial fridge. The affected operating
system, which serves mostly
University faculty and staff, is known as Open VMS and is being phased out because of a lack of available hardware and application support.
St Sauver said the older system competes against other operating systems such as Solaris, Linux and other types of Unix, as well as windows-based servers such as Windows 2000. Most government laboratories, universities and colleges moved away from using the Open VMS platform in the mid-to-late 1990’s.
St Sauver said no new accounts will be created on oregon.uoregon.edu and, by fall 2004, any e-mail being sent to Oregon automatically will be redirected to Darkwing.
“In most cases, users will already have a Darkwing or Gladstone account since those are the primary systems we’ve been generating accounts on for new users,” St Sauver said.
Computing Center documents librarian Vickie Nelson said that she’s not worried about the changes.
“I think it will work smoothly,” she said. “I think there is enough lead time to get the changes made.”
In related news, Darkwing users now have the option to condense their e-mail addresses from “[email protected]” to “[email protected].”
St Sauver said the changes were implemented to allow faculty and staff to have a shorter e-mail address that may convey a more professional or official appearance. All e-mail sent outbound will still have the “darkwing” prefix, however, unless users manually change the e-mail address in their user preferences.