System Maintenance 2/12/2010

A number of the SHSU administrative computing systems (including SamMenu, Nell, SamWeb, Financial Aid) will be unavailable Friday evening, February 12th starting at 6 pm for system maintenance and should be completed by 9 pm. We appreciate your patience.

Microsoft Injunction

Microsoft Corporation lost a legal suit resulting in an injunction against their Word 2003 and 2007 products regarding the use of custom-XML editing abilities. The SHSU campus is not immediately affected by this injunction, although we will be updating the installed versions across campus to comply.

If you do not know what custom-XML editing does for Word 2007, you are likely not affected by this change and will see no difference in Word. If you are concerned with the feature being removed, please email us so we may work together in identifying an appropriate solution before our official cut-off date.

If you are using Office products at your home acquired through the Home Use Program available to all faculty and staff, you are not affected by this injunction. Please contact Microsoft directly with any questions related to your home use and this injunction.

Microsoft Press Release
Description of the Change in Functionality

Banner Financial Aid Maintenance 1/29/10

Banner Financial Aid will be unavailable for system maintenance beginning at 6:00 pm on Friday, January 29, 2010. We estimate that this will take approximately 5-6 hours. We appreciate your patience.

Internet Explorer Update 1/21/2010

Internet Explorer users,

In response to the recent public disclosure of several vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, Microsoft has released an update. See the Microsoft Security Bulletin and Microsoft Security Response Center web pages for further information.

We have released this update to campus. The update will install and your PC will reboot to apply the patch tonight. Please ensure that you log out of your computer when you leave for the day.

Brief System Downtime 1/15/2010 @ 6pm

The SHSU computing systems and telephones will be down briefly on Friday evening at 6 pm. This outage is needed to strengthen the campus information security system with firewall upgrades.

Outlook PST Files

You may have noticed over the last half of the Fall '09 semester that your account may have taken an unusual amount of time to log in at times. After extensive troubleshooting by our System Administrators and Microsoft, we believe we have identified a significant factor, if not the cause, of the performance problems we have been experiencing. The performance issues appear to be related to Outlook PST files being accessed directly from the S drives (or T drive); closing the connections to only PST files appears to return response times to normal levels.

PST files are not supported on network shares; this is something we have been aware of but never addressed as it did not seem to cause us an issue and seemed a good solution for keeping exchange mailboxes small. There are several articles detailing why they should not be stored on the network: http://blogs.technet.com/askperf/archive/2007/01/21/network-stored-pst-files-don-t-do-it.aspx and http://support.microsoft.com/kb/297019/en-us probably provide the best overview.

We cannot be 100% certain that the PST files are the only cause, but to further investigate (and be in a supported configuration) we must remove all PST, OST and PAB files from s: drives and the t: drive. The first part of our plan is as follows:

Over the Christmas break, we will:

• Implement file screening to prevent storing .pst, .ost and .pab files on the s: and t: drives; any users that currently have these file types stored will still be able to access, modify and delete the files, but not rename, create or restore. If you try to move, copy, create, or rename a PST file you will see the following errors.

• Disable Outlook Archive; this will prevent the automatic creation of PST files.
  

We will attempt to make this change as painless as possible and work with you on any quota issues that you run into with Exchange to accommodate.

Did you know? -- Mail Merge Edition

If you need to create mailing labels for department mailings you can use Microsoft Word 2007 and FileZilla to get the job done. Just follow the guides below to learn how to create and mail merge mailing labels:

Creating a List

Mail Merging your file in Microsoft Word

Many other helpful guides are available in our Technology Tutorials.