Students with classes in Saunders Hall, a 7-story classroom building on the UH Manoa campus, as well as faculty and staff with offices located upstairs in Saunders (Economic, Geography, Political Science, Public Administration, Public Policy Center, Social Science Research Institute, Sociology, and Women’s Studies) have been told all of the building’s elevators “are out of commission until further notice.”
The bad news came yesterday in an email from the UH Manoa Facilities Management Office.
Facilities Management has been working with the Elevator Company to resolve this issue as soon as possible. As of Tuesday, March 08, 2011 at 6:30 p.m., the Service Technician could not bring the elevators back into service. The elevators will remain out of commission until further notice. Facilities Management and the Elevator Company will be working to resolve some issues and hope to have at least one of the elevators returned to service by the close of day tomorrow, Wednesday, March 09, 2011.
This means students and staff can’t get to work or to class without climbing the stairs.
This immediate crisis is just the latest in what have been chronic problems with the building’s elevators, apparently another instance of deferred maintenance in the heavily used building.
A small central courtyard on the ground floor of Saunders is closed, reportedly due to the danger of bits of falling concrete caused by spalling in the surface of the building.
In other UH news, the university is trying to get out of the email business by migrating all campus email accounts to Google Apps for Education, known here as Google@UH. The UH system expects to save significant amounts now spent on its internal email. Student email accounts began moving to Google@UH on February 1, and consultations with faculty on all the UH campuses are now underway.
Google offers its Google Apps for Education as a free service, and UH expects significant cost savings.
The savings achieved by this change will include the repurposing of current hardware used to support the legacy @hawaii.edu email service, reallocations of staff who currently support the email servers and storage, repurposing of the current servers and storage to other high-priority needs, elimination of the future requirement to replace the current servers and storage when they reach end-of-life, and limited cash savings. There will also be savings to departments that currently administer their own email systems to overcome the limitations of the current UH service and may choose to move to Google@UH to obtain the increased quotas, integrated calendaring with mobile syncing and improved webmail client.
I did notice one interesting and potentially troubling provision in the agreement signed with Google.
Publicity Customer hereby consents to Google’s inclusion of Customer’s name in a customer list, but only if Customer is not the only customer appearing on the list. Other than this, neither party may make any public statement regarding the relationship contemplated without the other party’s prior written consent.
Exactly what restrictions this places on UH officials isn’t immediately clear, and that’s a problem, I think.
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Lave Net moved it’s client base to Google Mail last month.
To say it was a mess is being charitable.
Lost email was (and is) one of the many problems.
It will be interesting to see what happens at the UH.
Honolulu Notes
that provision on secrecy violates UIPA where government records exist as an agency cannot exclude disclosable government records by way of private agreement with a third party
I also experienced LavaNet’s migration to Google Mail & agree that it was a big mess. I blame the mess on LavaNet, though, not on the Google Mail app. LavaNet did not adequately inform or warn its customers about what would happen, nor did it provide any instructions on how to do things or basic troubleshooting. Once the migration fallout happened, it was impossible to reach any live help quickly, and their website stayed totally uninformative for days.
Now that I’ve been working with it, I like the Google Mail app & see its utility, but still question whether we all had to be subjected to such aggravation or worse in making the switch. I hope that UH handles this better, particularly in providing how-to materials for everyone switching to Google Mail. They’d be wise to think about phasing in user groups as opposed to having all faculty or all staff switch at one time.
Isn’t there a seven story problem with the Americans with Disability Act and Saunders? How do folks with disabilities attend classes or reach offices in Saunders?
On our organization’s master listserv, I must have at least 400 addresses ending in @hawaii.edu.
What am I supposed to do? Change rhe addresses from joeblow@hawaii.edu to joeblow@google.com? Or does each recipient “fill out a form” and send it to Google.
Would appreciate some help here. Mahalo.
Folks are happy about the google switch so far- the ones I’ve talked to like it a lot better. I think most of the complaints about hawaii.edu accounts is that the interface is old and clunky, it’s really difficult to send to mobile devices, and the limited storage. I’ve had mine pushed to my gmail since the very beginning for all those reasons, plus I like to have a good search function within my email.
As for the elevators, the ones in Moore Hall are just as unreliable and probably ought to be replaced outright instead of the several-times-weekly maintenance after they break down (again). Those ones actually give me nightmares!
How exactly does one build an elevator… out?! oh like the Ilikai I guess.
@cwd Switchers get to keep their hawaii.edu email address. So no worries.
More info:
http://www.hawaii.edu/uhmfs/documents/GoogleProposal_022511Final.pdf