Today was very productive ... at least in my eyes

Most of today was the type of day I enjoy in the office ... extremely busy, but hightly productive. There were a few issues during the day that I wish wouldn't have happened, but all in all, it was a good day.

For the past 6 weeks, I have been promoting the idea of us (IT) bringing up a 'secure' SMTP server, so all of our clients (students, faculty and staff) would have easy access for sending mail, if they were using IMAP access. We had already received the hardware to host the server, but other items took priority over the completion of this task. This week the rubber finally met the road, so to speak. We had students moving into residences which had no access to an SMTP server. In simple english, that meant they could check their mail, but not send any. With that ammo, I was able to leverage the resources to get the job accomplished. At 9:45 am this morning (the Friday before classes begin on Monday) I was notified the server was in place and considered a production server. by 10:00, I had completed my testing of the settings required to use the server, both from an on-campus connection, as well as two off-campus dial-up accounts. At 10:35, I had documentation created and delivered to our webmaster for publication, which included instructions for setting up IMAP/SMTP connections using both Outlook Express 6 and Outlook 2003.

At 11:30 I was notified that Cox internet customers weren't able to utilize our SMTP server, due to Cox deciding to block port 25 acess for all of their customers. By 12:15, after researching information on Cox's Customer Support site, I had additional instructions created for our clients that might be using Cox at their residence. The instructions explained why they weren't going to be able to use our SMTP settings, as well as a link to the page which provided the SMTP setup instructions from Cox. This new document was on-line (both as a directed link page from our "How To" site, but also linked from the two initial pages) by 1:45.

This is the kind of day I like, busy but with very noticible results. I even got a few verbal 'atta-boys' from people who don't give them out all that often. You gotta love it when a plan comes together!
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