Wednesday, March 17, 2004

I just had a problem with IT as I was trying to get access to a Club's account and e-mail address. So I just camped out in the Computer Support department for 30 min until the issue was resolved.
It is now resolved. Note that compared to possible weeks or months average resolution times in other parts of the world, this is still more efficient.

In general though and honestly, I'd revisit INSEAD's IT strategy. If the ambition of the school is to be truly global, it is nice to have a truly global resource access.

- NetVestibule as a peer-to-peer community. This is a great idea, easy to navigate but pretty simple looking
- Intranet - Internet in constant flux
- Classes and faculty pages
- Career related sites: internal CMS, job postings, FUTURE for applications and interview scheduling, etc...Easy to use, works well.
- Alumni website, just been revamped as "amphi" went live. Very useful.

However...

- If I want to find out a phone number for a management person, I go to Staff Directory and I have the list of numbers in Fontainebleau. It is not clear to me where the Singapore contacts are. (CMS is an exception since they have a dedicated site and everyone's picture, responsibilities and contact details are clearly laid out)
- I switched campus, I had my account in Fontainebleau deleted and a new one created. Switching back: same mess. Of course, my personal contacts were also deleted in the process. Actually some people told me that they had not received emails because I had sent my messages to their other_campus account (I had no clue, I just typed their names).
- When Fontainebleau wakes up, the network connections in Singapore slow down considerably. In fact, network operations in Singapore are much slower than in Fontainebleau. I was told that it was because Singapore was routed via Fontainebleau for some reason
- If you have a problem with some of the "global" sites (such as the alumni site), you can call a phone number in Fonty, available only during French office hours.
- Network drives (I drive for personal backed up space and K drive for global access) are independent on the two campuses and cannot be accessed by the other campus (I have not tried FTP). Every student must back up its own data, carry it across and download it again at the other end. When you switch back, same mess.
- Clubs have SG or FB email and general IT accounts.

Submit your proposals online ;-)

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