Don’t you just hate it when your e-mail is on the fritz for a couple hours? How about for a week?
That’s what happened to the village of Brookfield recently, when its e-mail server crashed on two occasions. The second time, village employees were without e-mail access for six days.
“Earlier in [August] the database on our exchange server was corrupted,” said Assistant Village Manager Keith Sbiral, who is in charge of technology at village hall. “We fixed that Thursday. Then on Friday morning the server crashed and brought us down to our knees. We had to rebuild it all from scratch.”
Sbiral said that e-mail access could have been restored earlier, “but we wanted to make sure we didn’t lose any data.”
While online calendars for things such as building inspections were not affected, the outage did hamper communication efforts between the village and residents.
“You learn that you’re very dependent on e-mail very quickly,” Sbiral said.
By Sept. 1, new e-mail messages started populating employees’ in-boxes, but employees weren’t able to send messages until all incoming e-mail messages were recovered. According to Sbiral, the village did not need to replace any computer hardware as a result of the crash, and officials are still looking into the cause of the problem.
“It was a relatively new server,” Sbiral said. “I think it was a freak incident. Once we get everything up and running, we’ll do a debriefing and try to find out what the cause was.”
Sbiral also said that, as a precaution, the village is considering bringing back the old e-mail server and mirroring it to the existing server as a backup in case of a future outage.
Source:http://www.rblandmark.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=6506
