The Help Desk will close on Friday, July 4th in observance of Independence Day. The Help Desk will reopen on Monday, July 7th returning to the summer schedule of 8:30 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.

If there is a campus emergency affecting campus servers or IT services, dial (704) 894-2900 select option 4.

If you have a non-emergency request or problem, please email the Help Desk or leave a voicemail by dialing (704) 894-2900 and selecting option 1 or 2.

We will contact you when the Help Desk reopens. Our summer business hours are Monday - Friday, 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m.

Many Mac users have been frustrated over the last few months by an inability to open documents saved in Microsoft's new Open XML format (docx, xlsx and pptx files). At long last, however, the cavalry have arrived -- Microsoft has released their Open XML Converter package in finished form.

The converter installs quickly and, with the latest revision of Office 2004 installed, works transparently. You can use it to convert single documents on the fly, or to convert many documents at once. This saves the trouble of asking a document's sender to resave the file in an older format.

Full instructions are available via the ITS knowledge base.

Each year, the Information Technology Services Department celebrates the accomplishments of the academic year with a picnic style lunch. In order to attend this picnic, the Help Desk will close on Tuesday, July 15, from noon until 2:00 PM.

If there is a campus emergency affecting campus servers or IT services during this time, please dial (704) 894-2900 and select option 4.

If you have a non-emergency request or problem, please email the Help Desk or leave a voicemail by dialing (704) 894-2900 and selecting option 1 or 2. Messages will be responded to once the Help Desk reopens Tuesday afternoon.

*The Help Desk summer schedule is Monday - Friday, 8:30 AM to 5:00 PM. In August, the Help Desk will return to normal business hours, Monday - Friday, 8:00 AM to 5:00 PM.

In September 2007 ITS completed a significant upgrade of the College e-mail system. At that time URLs for many standard functions were changed. In particular, if you are still using the URLs, www.mail.davidson.edu and frogmanhenry.davidson.edu for web access to e-mail, you will be automatically redirected to a page displaying the correct URL, webmail.davidson.edu.

If you were accustomed to bookmarking the URL for Outlook Web Access (OWA), you should add http://webmail.davidson.edu to your library of bookmarks and remove any references to the outdated URLs cited above.

On Tuesday, July 29 from 6:00 - 7:00 a.m. all network services campus-wide will be unavailable while Physical Plant and ITS install a large uninterruptible power supply (UPS) in Chambers. The UPS will power a storage system known as a SAN or storage area network. The installation of a secondary SAN in Chambers is part of a long term ITS plan to improve disaster preparedness by replicating critical campus data and systems from the primary data center on Jackson Street to the secondary location in Chambers.

If you have any questions or would like more information on ITS' disaster preparedness plan, I will be happy to chat with you. If you have any questions about the network outage, please contact David Link (dalink@davidson.edu).

Beginning in 2003, ITS implemented a wireless (Wi-Fi) network that has since been expanded to cover virtually every indoor and outdoor gathering space -- classrooms, labs, residence halls, library, offices, etc. Encryption, sometimes referred to as Wi-Fi security, was not originally implemented because of limitations in hardware and software owned by students and the college. Practically, the absence of Wi-Fi encryption means web browsing to addresses that start with http instead of https could be potentially compromised by electronic eavesdropping.

Advances in hardware and operating systems have eased the implementation of encryption and, on Tuesday, July 29th, ITS plans to replace our single wireless network, DavidsonWLAN, with two separate secure networks:

Students and personally-owned laptop computers will connect to WildcatNet.

Employees using college-owned laptop computers will connect to DavidsonSecure.

The unsecured DavidsonWLAN will remain available for guest access and non-computer devices (cell phones, PDAs and other such devices that have wireless capability).

Please follow these instructions to set up your laptop computer on the appropriate network.

As always, if you have questions or need assistance, please contact the ITS Help Desk at helpdesk@davidson.edu or ext. 2900.