HASCS employees have been working feverishly to fix the problems with the system.

"Our staff has been working day and night to get the new equipment working," Steen says. "It took longer than we expected [but] the load was also greater than expected."

The IT committee also commended the job done by HASCS staff.

"The HASCS staff is a resilient group," reads the committee's September report. "They enjoy working hard and often work late at night and early in the morning when there would be little to see through their windows--if they had them."

Already this year, HASCS has made substantial improvements. It broke its own record for getting student accounts operating at the beginning of the year, by connecting 4,500 students in three weeks.

Computer support has also improved, according to Osterberg, who is responsible for coordinating the user assistants who help undergraduates and graduate students set up network connections and handle other e-mail and networking problems.

HASCS employs 52 students as UAs this year, compared to only 10 about five years ago, Osterberg says.

"Our residential support is on the cutting edge," Osterberg says. "Harvard's model is the second best in the nation only to Stanford which had a 10-year [lead]."

But HASCS will have to continue to work hard on the network because this fall's changes do not represent a long-term solution.

As a result of the increasing usage, Osterberg describes the newly, installed servers as "a medium term solution" which should last until the spring.

HASCS is considering major changes in the architecture of the e-mail system in order to achieve the expectation that "you should always be able to get your mail and always get it delivered immediately, you shouldn't have to wait to log-on and the system won't go down," Osterberg says. "That's the expectation we work to maintain."

The organization is considering instituting IMAP protocol which connects directly to the mail server but downloads only what a user needs, according to Osterberg.

IMAP, unlike Eudora, allows users to save their messages on a central server and retrieve them from any remote location.

Is There a Vision?

Despite the growth of its staff, HASCS's focus on simply keeping the system operating has prevented it from creating and following a larger vision for information technology in the College.