June 18, 2008
The University’s Microsoft Office license has been extended to include installation on non-University owned computers that are used for University-related work. So if you are a faculty or staff member who works at home, you will be able to download and install Office without purchasing a license. Previously, under this agreement, staff and faculty could download and install Office only on University-owned computers.
Office is available for download by faculty and staff from UDeploy software distribuition site at https://udeploy.udel.edu/. Students are not covered under this license agreement. For further information on the details of the license agreement, see UDaily or contact oet-help@udel.edu.
May 29, 2008
Exchange account users on the Office of Educational Technology (OET) domain each have a mailbox on the OET Microsoft Exchange Server. Exchange mailboxes have a physical size limit imposed by Microsoft which cannot be overridden by any Microsoft-supported settings. Therefore, to ensure that you have continued e-mail service through the Exchange Server, you need to maintain your mailbox within the established size limits.
If you are an Exchange client, the OET mail storage limits are set to warn you when your mailbox reaches 1.4GB in size. If your mailbox continues to grow, you will not be able to send mail when your mailbox reaches 1.75GB, and you will not be able to send or receive mail when your mailbox reaches 2GB. However, you can easily manage your Exchange account within Outlook.
For details on how to manage your Exchange account e-mail within Outlook, see How-to-clean-up-your-exchange-account (PDF). If you’d like to meet with an OET technician to manage your Exchange account, just send a note to oet-help@udel.edu.
May 22, 2008
In a few CHEP units, it is routine to request Microsoft Exchange accounts—local e-mail accounts on the College mail server—for new employees or grad students; in most units, this service is extended only to administrators and secretaries. The touchstone is generally: if the person needs to look at another person’s calendar to fulfill their responsibilities, an Exchange account is warranted. (This is an ADDITIONAL service over and above the login which allows people to use departmental computers and save to “the H: drive.”) When OET receives an Exchange-account request, we send someone out to orient the new employee. The first step in the orientation is to forward their e-mail from their @udel.edu account to their Exchange account. All their e-mail then flows to their Exchange mailbox; they read it using Outlook or webmail.oet.udel.edu, and save it on the Exchange server. We routinely set their return address to be their @udel.edu address, so they have a public e-mail address that looks like that of any other UD student or employee.
Since this orientation generally occurs during their first week in a new job, people typically forget that it happened. They may be unaware that OET or their CHEP affiliation has anything to do with their mail service. The dark side of the picture is that their e-mail account will be terminated when their employment by the particular CHEP unit is over. Often, in fact, they have been away from the campus entirely for several days or weeks when OET gets the termination notice and pulls the plug. Panic! My e-mail disappeared! So OET is left to pick up the pieces, corresponding at a distance with an angry and bewildered ex-client who is no longer even affiliated with CHEP. This is unfortunate and need never happen.
If OET is notified BEFORE a person’s affiliation with CHEP ends, we can arrange a phone call or a visit to stop the forwarding. We can show them with remarkably little fuss or stress how to transfer their saved mail folders to another account or package them for travel. In extreme cases, we have made differential e-mail archives so that one or more of an employee’s successors have access to the history of their e-mail pertinent to the responsibilities being passed on.
If you are a temporary employee or student worker who reads mail using Outlook or webmail.oet.udel.edu, you need to know this: check in with OET before you leave. If you are the supervisor of such a person, you can do us and your workers a big favor by bearing it in mind and making it part of your exit debriefing.
April 28, 2008
The Office of Educational Technology can work with you to select a printer based on your needs. Some items to consider when making a printer purchase are your budget; whether you will need a color or black and white printer; whether you alone will use the printer or whether it will be used by others (i.e., whether the printer will be on a network); the warranty; and the cost of replacement toner. Another item to consider is what type of printer you want (e.g., an ink jet or laser printer). Although an ink jet printer tends to cost less, it’s toner may need replacement more often and an ink jet’s life cycle may be shorter than that of a laser printer.
If you are a CHEP faculty or staff member who needs a printer recommendation, write to oet-help@udel.edu.
April 21, 2008
In the past few days, many CHEP clients have received a fraudulent phishing e-mail that requests your University of Delaware (UD) mail account password or UDelNet ID. This is one of the latest phishing scams that spoof organizations, including UD, to request information such as passwords, credit card account numbers, social security numbers, and other personal, non-public information.
If you suspect that you have received fraudulent e-mail, do not reply to it or click on any links within the message; delete it. If you are unsure whether an e-mail is fraudulent, send a note to oet-help@udel.edu. The Office of Educational Technology and Information Technologies (IT), the central computing support organization at UD, will never ask for any information online to keep your accounts active.
For more information on phishing schemes and how to protect yourself, see Information Technologies’ Phishing Alert; Microsoft’s site on how to recognize phishing scams and fraudulent e-mail; and the Federal Trade Commission’s site on how to protect yourself against identity theft. Also, check for news on the latest phishing scams at the University on UDaily.
March 28, 2008
If you try to send an e-mail attachment and your e-mail message is not sent, or you receive an error message, your attachment may be too large to be sent. There is a 10 MB size limit for attachments that can be sent through UD mail. The solution is to use the UD Dropbox.
The UD Dropbox allows you to drop off files for (and pick up files from) UD and non-UD staff. In addition, you can use the UD Dropbox to send file types that would regularly be stripped from e-mail due to security concerns. So if you have a colleague across the country or across campus, the UD Dropbox is an excellent way to send and receive files.
March 3, 2008
The new Office versions give Windows and Macintosh users options to save in portable document format (PDF).
If you have Office 2007 installed on your Windows XP or Vista computer, a free add-in from Microsoft allows you to save files in PDF or in XML Paper Specification (XPS) format. This add-in works with eight 2007 Microsoft Office programs, including Word, Access, Excel, Publisher, Visio, InfoPath, OneNote and PowerPoint. Files saved in PDF format can then be read by Adobe Reader. Since this add-in does not come with Office 2007, you can download it from http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4D951911-3E7E-4AE6-B059-A2E79ED87041&displaylang=en.
In Office 2008 for the Macintosh, there’s nothing additional to download; the PDF file format option is available in the Save As dialog box on the file menu in Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.
February 18, 2008
Office 2008 for the Macintosh is now available on UDeploy for full-time staff and faculty to download and install for free on UD-owned computers. To see if your Macintosh can run Office 2008, you can view the system requirements at Mactopia, Microsoft’s Macintosh support site.
If you would like OET to install the software for you, or if you have questions about system requirements, contact us!
January 30, 2008
If you would like to install the new Office 2008 for the Macintosh on your University-owned computer, it will be available to full-time faculty and staff for download in February from UDeploy. In the meantime, Office 2004 is available for download.
January 23, 2008
Several clients have recently received an e-mail message that requests that they verify their UDelNet ID, password, date of birth and country. This e-mail is a phishing scam, unsolicited e-mail; the best thing to do is to delete the message. You will never be asked to verify your UDelNetID or password through e-mail. As a matter of course, do not respond to any e-mail by sending your password or any other personal information such as credit card numbers. Delete!
