Moodle System Emergency Maintenance

The Moodle system, lms.manhattan.edu, was offline for approximately 10 minutes this morning February 28th due to emergency maintenance.

At this time all functionality has been restored.

We apologize for any inconvenience that may have caused and will continue to monitor the moodle system today and throughout the weekend.

Sincerely,
Manhattan College ITS

Tell ITS

#TellITS - We have been receiving multiple tech-support requests via the Tell ITS form (http://manhattan.edu/tellits) as well as relevant feedback which enables us to provide faster and more efficient service to the Manhattan College community.  Thank you!

If you come across a technology issue on campus, please continue to notify us via the TellITS form.  You may also report issues to its@manhattan.edu or 718-862-7973.  The faster we know about an issue, the faster we can resolve it. We need your ongoing help to identify issues and get them resolved as quickly and efficiently as possible.

East Hill - Partial Network Outage Update

As of 12pm Friday February 14th we believe all East Hill network equipment to be back on line and functioning properly.

We will continue to monitor the data network in East Hill throughout the weekend.

East Hill - Partial Network Outage

ITS is aware of a partial network outage affecting areas of East Hill residence hall.  We have identified a failed component in the network hardware serving wired connections to about 1/4 of the building as well as JASPERNET wifi.

Due to the inclement weather, a full resolution may not be in place until Friday AM.

Phishing Emails

This is a reminder that Manhattan College ITS will never ask you for your username and password. There is another round of Phishing Scams making their way around the internet.  We felt it would be a good time to remind people to be wary of these emails.

How to tell if the email is real or phishing:

• Is the email signed by a generic entity?  Can you truly identify specifically who the email is from?  Emails from Manhattan College ITS will typically be signed "Client Services" or "Manhattan College ITS".
• How is the email written?  Does the email contain grammar and spelling mistakes?
• Does the email seem legitimate?  Sometimes just reading the email, it feels funny in your gut.
• Does the email ask you for personal information?  Manhattan College ITS will not ask you for personal information via email.

Please use this information not only regarding your Manhattan College account, but also for your bank account and other personal account information.

If you receive any unsolicited email or phone call from an entity, including an entity you recognize, proceed with caution.  You best bet is almost always to hang up and then call the entity at a known number to verify the legitimacy of the communication that was made to you.  You're better off safe than sorry.

What should you do if you have fallen victim to a phishing scam?

Depending on the type of information that you provided the steps vary:

• If a username and password was provided, immediately log in and change your password.
• If personal account information (a bank account, credit card information, social security number, etc) immediately contact those institutions to let them know what happened.

If you receive an email identifying itself as Manhattan College ITS and you are not sure if it is real or not, feel free to forward the email to its@manhattan.edu for verification.

Weather Events and Alerts: ITS Implements Fix to Ensure that Users Always See Updated Content on MC Homepage

During last week's back-to-back weather events, some folks reported seeing an older "weather alert" message on the college's home page: www.manhattan.edu.  To add to user confusion, the alert did not contain the date.

The "weather alert" messages were actually being updated and expired as intended, and were in sync with those sent out by the college via the e2Campus system.

The display of older "unrefreshed" web page content being seen by some users was a result of either server or browser caching,  a technique typically used for web pages whose content changes very infrequently. With caching, page contents are usually saved somewhere, and then delivered quickly to a user's browser when requested.  And because the page content is not expected to change frequently,  a user's browser does not need to frequently check to see if there are updates.  Caching makes subsequent visits to the same website or webpage faster for users, and can also dramatically improve server performance.

If a website or webpage has been updated since your last visit, however, your browser should see the update and then load the new content instead of the old cached content.  In some cases, this doesn't work as expected and your browser displays the old information instead - as experienced by some users last week.

After users reported this issue, ITS implemented a fix on the server side such that a user's browser now will check every 5 minutes to see if there is any new content on a webpage.  This may decrease server performance a bit for web content editors, but should not in general impact users viewing the website.  Content editors, if severely impacted, should report the issue so that we may fine-tune.

In addition, the character limit for the alert message was increased, ensuring that there is space to include sufficient message details.

Perhaps this fix can be tested during the next weather event? We await your feedback!

Sorting Voicemail Email

Voicemail -to- email services have been available to the Manhattan College community since the roll-out of the new telephone system in September, 2013 (if you have not yet done so and would like to opt-in to this service please click here) .  Once voicemail is forwarded to you Manhattan College email account, you can sort the messages by implementing Gmail filters and/or inbox tabs.  This is especially helpful if you receive tens or hundreds of email each week, making it a hassle to search for voicemail messages in your inbox.

With Gmail filters you have the ability to copy all voicemail messages to a "Voicemail" folder, making it easy and convenient to find new messages and refer back to them in the future.  Click here for step-by-step instructions on setting up a filter for your voicemail messages.

Gmail inbox tabs can also be implemented to better organize the flow of incoming messages to your Manhattan College email account.  Emails are automatically sorted into various tabs such as "social", "promotions", and "updates", making it easier to find important messages.  Voicemail messages can be sorted into a tab such as "updates", along with other messages of the same type.  Click here for instructions on implementing and customizing Gmail inbox tabs.