The Information Technology Office is working to resolve a hardware failure in the Conference server room.  We are currently waiting on a replacement device to be overnighted from the manufacturer and expect it to arrive tomorrow morning.  Once this device has arrived we will be able to restore full service to all of our online systems.  As of this writing the following systems are running using a temporary solution:

• The main nccumc.org website
• The Online Data Collection System
• The Conference Google Apps E-mail System

Clergy e-mail is currently being accepted and held in each mailbox.  No messages will be lost during this outage.  Unfortunately the clergymail server is currently offline.  If you have an e-mail account hosted on this server your e-mail will not be lost.  Once service is restored you will be able to check your messages and catch up. We appreciate your patience while we work through this unforeseen hardware issue and regret the inconvenience.  Please continue checking the IT blog for updates tomorrow as the resolution progresses.  If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to use our contact form.

Update: February 9th 2011 – 11:00 AM – The replacement hardware has arrived and the IT Office is currently working to prepare it for deployment.  We anticipate service to be restored this afternoon.  Please continue checking this website for updates.

Update: February 9th – 1:15 PM - All services are now fully restored.  Please report any error messages or issues that you may experience to the IT Office.

The Information Technology Office will be performing scheduled systems maintenance on Friday, February 18th 2011.  The maintenance window will begin at 5 PM and will be expected to last for several hours.  All Conference services will be offline during this time with the exception of the Conference and Ramus Google Apps e-mail systems.  Thank you for your patience while we perform this needed maintenance.  If you have any questions or concerns please feel free to contact us.

The Information Technology Office is posting an End of Life (EOL) announcement for our old churches.nccumc.org domain.  Due to the phenomenal success of our Ramus system we will be ending support for this sub-domain on April 2nd, 2011.

The Information Technology and Communications Offices will be working in the coming weeks to migrate all of our Clergy e-mail accounts to our new Google Apps system.  When this project is complete all of our Clergy (Retired and Active) and Conference Staff will be able to interact and collaborate on the same Google Apps system.  We will all be able to take advantage of the Gmail web interface for e-mail, Google Calendar and Google Docs & Spreadsheets.  In short, if you have an nccumc.org account you will be able to participate in this online collaboration.  This new system provides a large range of features that will help our Clergy better communicate with each other, with members of their congregation and with the Conference Staff.  We are very excited to begin offering this technology soon.

Please note the following migration timeline:

• The IT Office will work directly with a small pilot group (10-20) in the next two weeks to begin their migration.
• Depending on the success of the pilot group the next group (approx. 100) will be migrated in Mid February.
• The remaining e-mail accounts will be migrated in early March.

If you have a Clergy e-mail account hosted on our old server you will be contacted via e-mail when we are ready to migrate your account.  The Conference Staff will be happy to address any migration issues we encounter during the process.  We look forward to working with you during this exciting time of transition.  Please feel free to contact us if you have any questions or concerns.

The Information Technology and Communications Offices worked in December to finish migrating all of our local church domain (Ramus) e-mail accounts from the old Surgemail server to the new Ramus Google Apps system.  As such we will be shutting down the old Surgemail server on Friday, February 4th 2011.  If you have any important information still on the Surgemail server that has not been migrated to the Ramus system we will need to complete the transition by this date.  Please feel free to let us know if you have any questions, concerns or need any help with the rest of the transition.

The Information Technology and Communications Offices have been working over the last several months to migrate the Conference’s e-mail and collaboration infrastructure over to the Google Apps system.  Along the way we have received several good questions regarding issues of privacy and the various Google services.  Since we have received these questions we decided to compile all of the answers into one comprehensive privacy document.

We have currently migrated all of the Conference Staff and District Offices over the last few months.  All of our Local Church domain e-mail accounts are being migrated this week.  The remaining clergy e-mail account migration will begin after the new year in middle to late January 2011.  Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns after reading over this information.

We are working to resolve it as soon as possible. We will update this blog when finished.

Update – November 25th – 7:57 AM - E-mail delivery has been restored to the clergy e-mail server.  We are still working to have a resolution in place for the Local Church Domain e-mail service.  Unfortunately that service remains down at this time.  We will continue posting updates to this website as the resolution progresses.

Update – November 27th – 9:40 AM - The IT Office has completed repairs to the e-mail system.  All mail is now delivering properly to the Clergy e-mail account server.  You should experience no significant delays in sending/receiving messages.  Unfortunately during the repair process some legitimate clergy e-mail could have been lost.  If you sent any e-mail from/to a clergy e-mail account on the day of November 24th you may want to follow up and verify that the message was received.  We regret the inconvenience that this will cause.

The IT Office is now working on migrating all of our Ramus e-mail accounts to our new Google Apps interface.  We will be contacting the Local Churches directly with the information needed to access these accounts on our new server.  We regret the additional delay in service but look forward to extending an excellent service to these e-mail accounts.

The Information Technology and Communications Offices have been working this morning to address a website issue that was reported earlier this morning.  When someone visits our main website (http://nccumc.org) they are immediately redirected to a Google Apps login page.  We have tracked this issue down to a glitch in our embedded calendar application.  As such, this application has been disabled temporarily while we work to correct it.  You should be able to browse our main website now with no errors.  We will update this issue on the IT Office website (http://nccumc.org/it) as it progresses.  We regret any inconvenience this may have caused.  Please feel free to contact the IT Office with any questions or concerns.

Update Monday, 10/11: The Conference calendars have been repaired and are available on the website.  Please continue reporting any issues to the IT Office directly.

Google has rolled out an update to their Gmail and Google Apps services that allows the Conversation View to be disabled.  Gmail can now display e-mail in chronological format the same way that Microsoft Outlook does.  You can find out more about it over on the Faith & Technology Blog.

The Information Technology Office is working this morning to address an SSL security issue. If you receive any SSL related error messages while checking your e-mail or browsing to the Clergy webmail address please be patient while we work to address it. We will post any updates to this page.

Update 11:24 AM: The SSL Certificate problem has been addressed. All clients should be connecting normally now. Please report any errors received after this time to the IT Office directly. You can contact us here.