Faculty Email FAQ's
Will my email address
change? Will they be available after January 1st
Your email address will be changing to the same format used by staff at your location, typically the first letter of your first name, followed by your last name @<School Brand>.edu (Ex. @aii.edu, @argosyu.edu). However we will re-point your existing email address so that emails sent to it will still be delivered to your new mailbox. When you send emails from the new system your emails will always appear to recipients to come from your new address. If you are not receiving emails from your old address, please contact your school support staff. Once you get your new account, you may want to test this by sending an email to your old account and making sure that you receive the email in your new account.
How do I get my new email account and password information?
We have implemented an automated provisioning process to create your accounts, once your information is entered into the HR system. Once your account is created you can go to the account activation tool to get your new account name and email address as well as set your initial password. The web activation manager is located at http://wam.edmc.edu. This site will require that you know your Employee ID and some other personal information to gain access. Please see the instructions on this site if you need help using this tool. If you do not know your Employee ID check the following locations:
If you have an OLS portal account log into the portal and your employee ID should be listed next to or under your name on the main page. You can look in the upper left corner of your pay statement. When entering your Employee ID do not enter the beginning zeros. Contact your Human Resource Director.
If you are currently using corporate supplied email, there are no changes for you. If you are an Ai faculty member and you currently receive email through the OLS system you will be able to access Exchange webmail through the OLS system by clicking the “My Email” link. All other faculty members can access the Exchange system by going directly to http://webmail.edmc.edu. If you are using external clients, such as Outlook, Entourage, MacMail on or after January 2nd you will need to change the IMAP & SMTP addresses using the instructions provided on this site. You will also be required to configure your client to use secure IMAP and SMTP (SSL). Once your account is created you can go to the account activation tool to get your new account name and email address as well as set your initial password. This site will require that you know your Employee ID and some other personal information to gain access. Please see the instructions on this site if you need help using this tool. If you do not know your Employee ID check the following locations:
If you have an OLS portal account log into the portal and your employee ID should be listed next to or under your name on the main page. You can look in the upper left corner of your pay statement. When entering your Employee ID do not enter the beginning zeros. Contact your Human Resource Director.
What new features will be in the new email system?
Email Space will increase from 5 to 100 MB
Addition of Anti-virus and Anti-spam protection
Full Exchange Functionality through Web mail (OWA).
Global Address lists
Calendaring and Calendar Sharing
Rich text editing
Where can I find additional
information on the full features & functionality of the system?
Please see the email documentation located at http://www.edmc.edu/emailtraining/documents.shtml. We will continue to review and update this site with new information.
We have taken care to ensure all functionality in the current system is retained within the new email system. While the current functionality has been retained, some features work a little differently than they do today, although they accomplish the same task. It is important that you familiarize yourself with the documentation on this site in order to ensure that you get the most out of your experience with the new system.
NO. Please follow the instructions on this site for how to manually backup and restore emails, address books and settings that you would like to have available after we complete this transition. We also recommend that you setup a forwarding address from your current email account to a personal email account before you complete your backup. To do this, access your email account, and then select preferences, and enter your personal email address in the box labeled “Forward Messages to this Address:”, then click the make changes button. This will ensure that you receive any emails which are delivered to your account after you perform your backup.
Prior to backing up your email for the final time, we recommend that you setup a forwarding address from your current email account to a personal email account. To do this, access your email account, and select preferences, then enter your personal email address in the box labeled “Forward Messages to this Address:” and click the make changes button. This will ensure that you receive any emails which are delivered to your account after you perform your backup.
Is there any planned
downtime when my existing email will be unavailable due to the transition?
If you follow the instructions provided, you should not lose any email. We are planning a cutover of your email address to your new inbox January 2nd, 2007. The exact time when emails begin to flow to your new inbox depends on how quickly the sender’s ISP propagates the network changes. We do plan to continue to deliver emails to your old inbox up to the cutover; however, as described above you should forward this account to a personal email account before taking your final backup so all emails are delivered either to your new account, or to your personal email account. At some point during the early morning January 2nd, there will also be a brief period of time when OLS will be unavailable. If you are logged in or attempt login during the cutover, you may receive a few errors or disconnects. When this happens, please close your email windows, wait 15 minutes, then re-attempt to access your account
If I am forwarding my email,
will I need to make any changes?
Yes. During the transition your forward will not be retained. As of the cutover you will not receive any new messages to your forwarded account. You will have to access the new system to get emails after the cutover. We encourage you to use the new system to communicate with your students.
Yes, and you will also have access to the global EDMC address book within the exchange system, by logging into webmail and searching the address book. This will provide you with a listing of all other faculty & staff at all locations. In addition, student distribution lists will be available within the Exchange address book, which you can use to contact your class.
Can I continue to access my
email using IMAP clients, such as Outlook or Entourage?
Yes, you can access the email system with any client that supports secure IMAP/SMTP. Please refer to the instructions on this site for configuration of these clients.
How much space is available
in my new inbox/web site?
You will have 100MB of space in your new inbox. If you need to archive messages, obtain an IMAP client and follow the instructions to setup.
Who do I contact if I need
help?
Please contact your school support staff for assistance.
Faculty Web Publishing FAQ's
NO. Please follow the
instructions on this site if you have any files on your website or data in your database you would like to backup and restore into the new site.
How much space is available
in my new web site?
You will have 50MB of space in your new web site.
How will I access the new web services?
You will continue to access the web publishing area through OLS by clicking the ‘My Website’ link. If you are using FTP or MySQL clients, there will be some changes as follows:
· On January 2nd or any time after you must go into OLS and change your password. This will cause your password to be synchronized with the new system.
· Your account may still be accessed by FTP, although this address will change to yourusername.aisites.com on or after January 2nd and your login name will be your full email address.
· MySQL databases may still be accessed by external clients such as MySQL control center, although you will need to change the server address to yourusername.aisites.com on or after January 2nd.
How can I backup &
restore my websites so it will be available on the new service?
Please see the documentation for backup and restore procedures on this site.
Is there any planned
downtime when my existing site will be unavailable due to the transition?
We are planning a cutover of your web site address to your new site on January 2nd, 2007. The exact time when a request for your site will be handled by your new account depends on how quickly the requestor’s ISP propagates the network changes. Your current site URL will work either on the old or new service throughout the transition, but you may specifically request the new site at any time on or after January 2nd using the URL yourusername.aisites.com.
If you have an advanced site, which keeps internal state or database information, your users may notice that state is different when the site URL cuts over.
If you are logged in or attempt to login to your web site or database during the cutover, you may receive a few errors or disconnects. When this happens, please close your email windows, wait 15 minutes, then re-attempt to access your account
What new features will be in
the web publishing system?
Yes, your site previously was located at http://stu.aii.edu/~username. While this address will continue to work, we recommend you change any links to your site to point toward http://username.aisites.com as this will be the true URL going forward, and your site will operate faster by pointing directly to it.
How can I backup &
restore my mysql database so it will be available on the new service?
Please see the instructions on this site for the steps to back and restore your MYSQL database.
Where can I find detailed
instructions on how to actually use these new features?
The new system will be intuitive, easy to use, and will work similar to other web publishing systems you may already be used to using. Nevertheless, when the new system goes live, a detailed series of videos and help documentation will be available online to assist you. To access the videos, you simply need to login to the system and select the link near the top of your screen to view the videos. The school support staff at your location can also provide more help if you require.
Will there be any training
available for the new services?
This training site will contain all of the information you will need to transition to the new web publishing system. In addition, on January 2nd when we go-live with the new system, training videos will be available for you to view at your convenience. If you have any other questions, please see your school support staff.
We have taken care to ensure all functionality in the current system is retained within the new system. While the current functionality of what you can build has been retained, some features work a little differently than they do today. It is important that you familiarize yourself with this documentation in order to ensure that you get the most out of your experience with the new system.
There are two new significant limitations that you need to be aware of:
First, in order to ensure that web publishing services are available and perform well for all students, your website will be limited to 4GB of network bandwidth per month. For example, this means if you publish a site that is 50MB, it can be viewed at most approximately 80 times during any given month.
Second, the new system does include an interactive backup system, although it is a little different from the current site. The new service allows you to manually make snapshots of your data and download it to your computer. Unlike before, backups of your data will count against your quota, therefore, we can’t stress enough that you should maintain off-site backup copies of your data at all times and as frequently as makes sense to you.
Will I need to make any
changes to my website?
Yes. You will need to manually re-publish your backup web site, re-create your databases and then reload your data. Finally you will need to modify links, or database connection strings in your web code as appropriate.
Your new web site home page will be located on the internet at yourusername.aisites.com. Through a redirector, your existing URL stu.aii.edu/~username will still work, and will access the same files you have published at aisites.com. We do however recommend you change any saved or published links, to access the aisites.com link directly, instead of through the redirector as the direct link will be faster.
When you access your new web publishing account you will initially see your root directory and any files stored within. Files you place in your root directory are not accessible to others via the internet. Copy into this directory any files or subdirectories you had in your existing account’s root directory, except for files you had under htdocs, asp, cgi-bin, ssi, or php.
Open the public_html folder on your new account. This directory is your web site home directory. Copy into it any files you previously had under your account’s htdocs directory. By default, your public html folder will have an asp and cgi-bin directory. Previously, these two directories existed at the root level of your account. Copy the files from the old asp and cgi-bin directories at the root of your old account to the directories with the same names under public_html on your new account.
Your old account also contained php and SSI directories under the root directory. These directories can also be copied into the public_html directory, but going forward they no longer need to be in separate directories. Whether you move them or leave them as-is, is up to you. Any file under public_html, but not under cgi-bin or asp can be php or .shtml.
Even though the directory structure is the different from the old system, the directory structure as viewed from the website will be the same, so you should not need to modify any http links in your site, although if you have absolute links we recommend you modify these to use the new aisites.com address for performance reasons.
Finally, if you have a site that uses server side scripting, such as CGI based counters, guest books, etc or database aware sites you may need to modify any hard coded file paths if you are using file i/o to the new locations given above. Second, you will need to modify your connect strings if you have databases to use the new database server name.
Any links, including MySQL server links that point to cgi.stu.aii.edu will no longer be available after the transition and should simply be modified to use the new yourusername.aisites.com URL.
Any sendmail and Perl bin paths are unchanged from the current system.
How do I get a web
publishing account username & password?
Ai Faculty members, you should already have received an OLS username & password, which you will continue to use to access the new system. If you are not sure of your username and password, please click the Forgot your Username or Forgot your password links on the OLS login page: http://stu.aii.edu
NO. Please follow the instructions on this site regarding changes to your website and backing up & restoring your database and website if you have any files that you would like to be available after we complete this transition.
Who do I contact if I need
help?