MySJU performance improved significantly yesterday afternoon once the Personal Announcement channel was removed.  While we are fairly confident that we have found the system bottleneck, Sungard and the IT support team will continue to monitor system performance very closely throughout the next several days and weeks.

Given the findings with the Personal Announcement channel, Sungard is creating a test environment on their servers in an attempt to re-create the processing bottleneck and develop a solution.  Until a resolution is provided by Sungard, IT has suspended the use of the Personal Announcement channel.

IT will continue to provide the direct links to Blackboard, Administrative Services and other MySJU services at least until the end of student registration.  If MySJU remains stable throughout the rest of the month, then the direct links will be removed.

As you probably have surmised, finding the source of the problem was no easy task because MySJU is a complex system with many integrated component parts.  Troubleshooting complex issues of this kind requires painstaking analysis of system log files and, over the course of the past several weeks, Sungard and IT have analyzed dozens of log files and hundreds of thousands of log entries.   Before pinpointing the problem channel yesterday, Sungard had made a number of recommendations to us, and we performed a number of system configuration changes with the hope of resolving the issue.  While each of these changes provided a measure of improvement and marginal relief to the community, none resolved what has now been identified as a software design problem..  We are reasonably hopeful that MySJU is once again stable and hope that the user community in time will return to the portal. 

Again, we sincerely regret the negative effect these problems have had on the University community and appreciate your patience and support throughout this long and painful process.

A team of IT support staff have been working on the problem around the clock and has engaged Sungard to find a permanent resolution to our problems. This morning, a senior consultant from Sungard will arrive on campus to work with IT until the problems are resolved. This consultant is one of Sungard’s top specialists and he has significant experience working in higher education settings with the portal software used by MySJU. We are hopeful that, with this level of expertise on campus, we will find the cause of the problems. We will keep you informed of our progress.

Until the problem is resolved, you may directly access services available in MySJU via the links below.
When prompted, enter your standard SJU username and password.

BLACKBOARD: http://blackboard.sju.edu/webapps/login

ADMINISTRATIVE SERVICES (such as Employee Information, Financial Information, Student Services, etc.): http://blackboard.sju.edu/webapps/login

STUDENT E-MAIL: http://botein.sju.edu/

CALENDAR: http://my.sju.edu:6785/

Students participating in registration, please follow instructions below without logging into MySJU:
• Point your web browser to: https://hermes.sju.edu
• Click on the link to “Enter Secure Area”
• Enter your regular My SJU username and password
• Click on “Student Services”
• Click on “Registration”
• Use “Add/Drop Classes” or “Look Up Classes to Add”
• Enter the Term
• Enter your Registration PIN

We, in Information Technology, sincerely regret the negative effect these problems have had on the University community.

OIT Home Page

The Office of Information Technology is happy to announce the preview of our new website at http://www.sju.edu/it. The new website, based on the University’s latest web design, is a streamlined version of the old site with a number of new communication tools.

The new site offers quick access to general information about IT and our services, and houses the gateway to our IT Support Portal where the bulk of our resources exist. Much of the information previously housed on the old site has been moved into the Knowledge Base within the Support Portal. This enables us to keep that information more up-to-date and the capability to target information to you. By logging into the Support Portal, you will get information specific to your needs, including access to any help tickets you’ve submitted, not just generic information that you have to dig through to get what you need.

The new site also includes interfaces with commonly used social networking tools as a way for us to improve our communications with University students, faculty, and staff.

Blogs	Our new blog site, http://www.sju.edu/blogs/stc, will be used to share technology news with the community. This includes news about SJU-specific technology as well as general technology tips and news for other sources. Plus, you can subscribe to its RSS feed and get the news right in your inbox.
Twitter	Twitter (http://twitter.com/sjuit) will be used to post the status of campus technology.
Facebook	And we’ve setup Facebook pages for the Faculty/Staff Helpdesk and the Student Technology Center which have links back to the IT News blog and Twitter for students, faculty, and staff who are want to follow us through their Facebook accounts.

We hope that you find the new site and use of these tools to be helpful in your use of technology on campus.

Thank you!

• Make sure have the latest Windows Updates (PC only) – To make sure your computer is up to date, please visit: http://www.update.microsoft.com/
• Make sure you have an Active, up-to-date Virus Protection application (PC and Mac). If your computer is in need of virus protection software, please download it from: http://it.sju.edu/downloads/. You will need to log in with your SJU username and password. If you do not know your SJU username and password, please reset it at http://my.sju.edu/

All business students are expected to use Windows XP, and business machines needing re-imaging will be re-imaged with Windows XP. All other computers running Windows on campus will also continue to use Windows XP.

Please refer to the link below for further information regarding all STC policies: http://it.sju.edu/policies-guidelines/stc_policies.html.

In total, wireless network access is now available in all of the following locations on campus:

*All Residence Centers, Campus Houses, and University Apartments & Townhouses (Lancaster Court does have a wireless network provided by Hotwire, not SJU)
*Main Campus: Barbelin/Lonergan, Barry, Bellarmine, Campion, Drexel Library, Mandeville, Post, Science Center, Ramsay Basketball Center, Wolfington, Boland, St Thomas, Claver, Bronstein
*Maguire Campus: Cynwyd Hall, Latches Hall, Music Studio
*Cosi (located in the Hawks’ Landing), Starbucks

In order to use our wireless network, please follow the instructions at: http://it.sju.edu/network_access/wireless/.