Viewpoint
Tech dependent
The nightmare began on the afternoon of Dec.
3. For some inexplicable reason, our e-mail
server went down. For good. With no backup.
All other projects were put on hold as the
IT and Web teams worked overtime to
re-establish what has become our most
important communications link.
At
first, the problem seemed like a minor
inconvenience, maybe even welcome relief–an
afternoon without e-mail coming in or going
out. By the next day, however, when the
seriousness of the outage became clear, that
inconvenience turned into the fear that
important documents and business requests
were lost in cyberspace.
We were at first assured that our e-mails
were in a queue in the damaged server and
would be recoverable. Later, we would learn
that this was not the case. Calls came in
from customers and others that their e-mails
had bounced back with "undeliverable"
messages. We feared people would assume that
the same "out-of-business" fate had befallen
Communications News as had happened to
some other publications recently.
After a couple of days, when the tech
teams realized the downed server was not
going to be resuscitated, and when not even
a Microsoft consultant could make heads or
tails out of the problem, a makeshift Web
mail system was set up. Rudimentary, at
best, but at least we could send and receive
e-mails, albeit using an alias e-mail
address.
Fortunately, we were able to access
folders in Outlook on the damaged server, a
very necessary access since we tend to use
Outlook to store important correspondence.
In my case, all correspondence regarding
future articles is stored there, for
example. Our Web mail workaround meant a lot
of back and forth between the old Outlook
and the Web mail program, negatively
impacting productivity, but at least we were
able to continue with day-to-day activities.
Technology has certainly made our lives
more productive (I would argue about how
much simpler it has made them.), but when
tech fails, business can almost come to a
standstill. People sit around wondering how
they are going to do their jobs–they have no
reference point about how to get tasks done
without a network server or e-mail.
For myself and many of my colleagues here
at Communications News, it was a real
gut check about how reliant we are on
e-mail, Outlook and technology in general.
kanderberg@comnews.com