Assorted Computer Woes

As some of you are all too well aware of, we have been dealing with some minor computer related annoyances of late. The issues that I have collected and been given answers for are as follows:

OUTLOOK ACCOUNTS. *ONGOING*
Some of you have been getting a security warning from your Outlook e-mail accounts (the non-Web version). The issue regards the issuing of a security certificate. The certificate is for the webmail.mhc.ab.ca address, but the actual server name is accio.mhc.ab.ca. The warning is the consequence of the security certificate and the server having two different names. Computer Services (CS) is working on a solution, so do not be alarmed.

REFERENCE E-MAIL ACCOUNT. *RESOLVED*
The Outlook account at the Information Desk will not be moved to the Exchange server or updated to Outlook 2007. Reference e-mail will have to be accessed via Outlook Web Access (OWA; https://webmail.mhc.ab.ca/owa). At this time, however, the account cannot be accessed via OWA. A similar situation occurred for the Audiovisual and Interlibrary Loans accounts, but has been resolved. CS is looking into this issue.

RELAIS FOR INTERLIBRARY LOANS. *ONGOING*
The ILL department has been experiencing an issue with accessing their Relais ILL applications via the network folder. Every time they try to access the application, they are prompted with a security warning about an unknown publisher. The application can be accessed after acknowledging the warning prompt. It will, unfortunately, continue to annoy - it is a Windows XP issue, and CS cannot resolve this matter.

I think these are the major issues to date. Anne has made me aware of a problem with our shared catalogue with the U of L. I will be communicating the anomaly to them today. *RESOLVED*

As with most computer related annoyances, these are grin and bare it situations. Oddly enough, I am using Windows 200o and its related Office package (both of which are much older than anything that the rest of you are using) without any issue. Sucks to be the rest of you using Windows XP.

First IT Professional

Information technology (IT) people sometimes get a bad rap about being discourteous, but there are cases when they are very patient with some of us. View the following video and see how the IT professional first handled a trouble call: [NOTE: Press the play button, otherwise you will be redirected to the clip's YouTube page.]



Thanks to Reni for bring this video to my attention.