Letter to the editor

IT Services defended

A balanced account of the recent e-mail outage should include acknowledgment of around-the-clock efforts expended by Information Technology staff to reinstate email as thoroughly and rapidly as possible. I work down the hall from the IT offices and saw these efforts first-hand. They included 18-plus-hour days, often without breaks or meals; relentless, eye-blurring review of technical data; and meeting constant inquiries from a sometimes- hostile public with detailed, honest status updates.

Moreover, I would like to take this opportunity to express my overall satisfaction with IT to date. I have worked at UWRF for only seven months, but over the last decade, I have worked at a number of academic institutions, including some techsavvy heavy-hitters. In my interactions with UWRF IT, I found the best balance between professionalism and responsiveness of any IT department I have encountered. Help Desk inquiries are answered thoroughly and efficiently; requests for input on storage systems, software and hardware are addressed comprehensively, quickly and collegially. I, for one, will use these uniformly positive impressions to place the events of last week into perspective.

Alyson R. Jones
Area Research Center/University Archives