The new e-mail system takes about a minute to load, and students and faculty aren’t receiving e-mails.

Chatt Chatterji, assistant vice president for Information Technology Services and Michael Hoadley, assistant vice president for the Center for Academic Technology, explained why the e-mail upgrades didn’t work out as planned at Tuesday’s Faculty Senate meeting.

Some faculty members still fell uncertain about the new e-mail system.

Chatterji addressed the senate by apologizing for some of the problems and took full responsibility for the system failures.

“It was the perfect storm,” he said. “It didn’t quite go as planned.”

Chatterji said he chose Zimbra for its cost and variety of features, because that seemed to be a concern of faculty and students over the last two years.

The new system does work, but it was wrongly configured, he said.

He said he is painfully aware of all the problems, and they were not supposed to happen.

“We made some assumptions with the company we went with,” he said.

Several things went wrong in the process, some not of his control, Chatterji said.

The faculty also questioned why the system upgrade took place over a short Labor Day weekend, leaving people without e-mail for several days.

Chatterji said he had planned on upgrading after the last summer session, but didn’t plan for the amount of spam that got in the way.

This is due to some intelligent people who are able to break down the Zimbra system, he said.

“I wish I could say it’s going to go away, but I can’t,” Chatterji said.

Chatterji decided to upgrade at the beginning of the year because if he waited, everything else would be pushed back.

This includes eventually having one database where one password could be used for all systems when banner comes, he said.

E-mail needs to be set up first before everything else can fall into place, he said.

Senator and history professor Lynn Curry was pleased after hearing Chatterji’s explanation, but said if the faculty had been told in a previous e-mail, many faculty members would have settled down.

A number of faculty members also mentioned the lack of communication between ITS/CATS and the faculty.

ITS and CATS have progressed over the years.

Hoadley said that CATS goes through a cycle of replacing about 800 to 900 computers a year at Eastern.

Of the 209 classrooms that need technology, 157 were made into technology-enhanced classrooms, he said.

Technology enhanced classrooms consist of data projection, smart boards, instructor stations with a wireless mouse and DVD players

Right now 75 percent of the classrooms that requested new technology are complete, and Hoadley hopes that in two years, 100 percent will be completed.

The senate also praised ITS for its service desk help.

Bud Fischer, biological sciences professor and senate member, stated that the help desk is much better than it was three years ago, and they actually have a sense of humor when they see you come back again and again for help, he said.

Hoadley was pleased to hear the positive and negative comments from faculty members and will be happy to come to any department to help, he said.

The Faculty Senate will discuss how three new presidential search committee members will be chosen at next week’s meeting.

The meeting will be at 2 p.m., Tuesday in the Booth Library Conference Room 4440.

Eric Hiltner/Daily Eastern News Chat Chatterji, the assistant vice president of academic affairs for Information Technology Services, explains the issues surrounding the recent upgrade to PantherMail during the Faculty Senate meeting Tuesday afternoon in

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