CIS News: August 2004

Faculty & Staff: Office 2003/2004 now available

Brown's software download page now offers the following new products or updates to existing products:

• Windows - Microsoft Office Pro 2003 & Novell NetWare Client 4.9 (SP2)

• Macintosh - Microsoft Office 2004 (Mac OS X, 10.2.8+)

Please note: Microsoft Office is part of the Microsoft Campus Agreement, for use by faculty and staff only.

Please notify the Help Desk (3-HELP) if you have any problems with these installers.

Windows XP SP2 potential impact for all XP users!

Microsoft has announced the release of a major Windows XP update,
Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2), on August 16. Machines of Windows XP
users who have followed CIS' security recommendations and run our
Windows Update Configuration Tool will automatically download and
install this critical update. Installation of this download may cause
problems with some Windows software; network performance may also be
impacted by the size of this download. For an overview of the
new features in this service pack, see our 5 minute online training video.
Please visit the following URL for more details:
http://software.brown.edu/dist/winxpsp2.html

New OWA with Exchange services upgrade

CIS is in the process of upgrading various components of the Campus Exchange infrastructure. While these changes will not require any reconfiguration of your email client, it will mean that if you use OWA you'll notice a significantly different look and many performance and feature enhancements after the upgrade has been completed.

Some of the new features include:

• Spell-check (requires Internet Explorer on Windows)
• Ability to add a signature to your outbound mail
• Junk mail filtering
• Blocking of embedded external HTML content
• Customization of the OWA interface

The upgrade itself occurs in two stages.

• The first stage was an upgrade of the OWA, POP and IMAP servers to the new version of Exchange. As a result, OWA icons are slightly different as isl the logoff page. (This upgrade took place on August 5.)
• Stage two involves upgrading the Exchange servers that host the mailboxes. The full OWA 2003 client will be available after upgrading the mailbox servers.

The mailbox servers for students will be upgraded first on Sunday, August 15, between 4:00 a.m. and noon. The following weekend, the servers for faculty and staff will be worked on between 8:00 a.m. and noon on Saturday, August 21. There will be intermittent email connectivity during the scheduled hours, with each upgrade incurring several short outages, generally only 5 to 10 minutes in length.

Note that all email messages and folders will be retained during the upgrade.

There are some final upgrade steps that may occur the first time you log on to your (upgraded) Exchange mailbox:

• If you use an IMAP client (like Outlook Express or Eudora in IMAP mode), you may notice that your client "hangs" for several minutes during the first logon to your upgraded mailbox. In the background, Exchange is upgrading the IMAP content of your mailbox and this delay will only happen once. Be patient and do not abort this process since you will simply have to wait through it later.
• If you use Outlook in Native/MAPI mode, Outlook Express or Eudora in POP mode, you won't experience any delay and you may not even notice that the upgrade has occurred.
• The OWA client is brand new and if you use OWA as your primary mail client, you will not experience a delay when you connect to your mailbox the first time.
• Messages that have been purged from your Deleted Items folder (this is where messages go when you "Empty Deleted Items") are not upgraded and your Deleted Message Recovery Area will be built from scratch after the upgrade. Please Note: messages in your Deleted Items folder are considered part of your proper mailbox and these messages will be upgraded with the rest of your mailbox folders.

Shut off of clear-text FTP for webpub web server

CIS will be turning off clear-text FTP on the webpub web server on August 18. Webpublishers who have not switched to a more secure FTP client will need to change how they connect to the web server by that date.

If you are using WS-FTP, Fetch or a version of Dreamweaver that is older than MX 2004, you are using clear-text FTP. Alternative software and instructions, and the reasons for this change, can be found at Web Pub Central.