Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Episode 695: IT Services, You Fail!

So the university's student e-mail migration to Microsoft Live@edu happened over the weekend, and I figured today would be a good time to try and get access to my new account. Somewhat unsurprisingly, I was unable to. IT Services had noted that some students were affected by the migration and had had their passwords reset accidentally, but I didn't think that was my problem, since my password still worked for accessing the university's internal pages, which IT Services said wouldn't be true if I were one of those affected. Thanks to Yannis, I discovered that what I needed to do was change my password to conform to the new requirements first, namely that it should contain a mixture of upper and lower case letters, and numbers. Only then was I able to access my university e-mail. All of this leads me to suspect that what IT Services has failed to realise is that by implementing this new requirement, people are being locked out of the very e-mail accounts to which they've been happily sending reminders to change our passwords. Brilliant, no? So I'm betting that all these students supposedly affected by the migration, who need to call IT Services to reset their password, are simply the victims of poor communication on the part of IT Services. In fact, I've concluded that none of the instructions concerning the e-mail migration are actually worth following! Even their instructions for forwarding e-mail from our old account to new were not helpful, and I had to figure out how to do it all by myself. Not impressed at all...

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