Email is slow at the present time due to a mass quantity of emails being processed.  ITS is working on reallocating the emails to smaller batches to help speed up processing.

 

At 2 am on Saturday the College's firewall stopped processing.  A firewall is a system designed to prevent unauthorized access to and from a private network.  All messages entering or leaving the Internet pass through the firewall which examines each message and blocks those that do not meet the specified security criteria.  The firewall was returned to normal processing at 3 am.  

 

The College will be upgrading to Office 2007 by the fall 2007 term.  Office 2007 has a new graphical user interface called the "Ribbon," replacing menus and tools bars; see below.   Most of what you want to do can be done from the "Ribbon," but you can click on a tab to display other ribbons.  When you work in a table, header, footer, or a spacial part of a page, a ribbon with format options appears automatically.    An Office Button replaces the "File" menu and Front Page is no longer used or supported.  New "galleries" display thumbnail images of formatting and other options. 

 

Staff in ITS will be learning all the new features that come with Office 2007 and will provide workshops on the new features for faculty and staff once the software is installed.

 

ITS will also be migrating the our PC operating system from Windows 2000 to Windows XP.  This migration will take place prior to the upgrade for Office 2007 as Windows XP is a requirement for Office 2007.

 

Dose it seem that you are getting more and more spam?   You are as the wave of spam hitting the Internet has reached record levels.  In the past year spam messages grew by 147% and more than a million unique Internet addresses take part in spam and virus attacks daily.   NCC receives around 200,000 emails per day and of those only 100,000 are allowed to enter our email system.  Filters are set up in our email system to further identify spam and they block another 50,000 emails before they reach your desktop.  ITS continually tightens its spam control but spammers are creative and find new ways around the latest greatest spam blocking tools. 

 

Weak passwords lead to unauthorized use of accounts which then leads to unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information.  Weak passwords can also lead to systemic security problems on other systems.  Some poor examples of poorly chosen passwords include: "password," a password that matches a user name, "cardinal," "fluffy," etc.  If you believe that all faculty, staff and students pick strong passwords---you would be wrong! 

 

Strong passwords should be 8 characters in length, have at least one alphanumeric character, at least one numeric character, and at least one punctuation or special character.