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Uploaded: Monday, October 22, 2012, 5:25 PM
Updated: Saturday, October 27, 2012, 9:11 AM
Pleasanton school district moves emails to new system, seeks to recover lost messages, data
For more than a week, it was back to 20th century with phones, faxes, one-on-one meetings providing communications
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by Glenn Wohltmann
Pleasanton Weekly Staff
The Pleasanton school district's email system was down for nearly a week, between Oct. 16 and 22, but the district has moved to the clouds to get a new system up and running.
Superintendent Parvin Ahmadi said every employee now has a new address to replace emails from the district's in-house email system. That system, provided by First Class, shut down unexpectedly when a disk array failed, according to Luz Cazares, assistant superintendent of business services. Disk arrays are storage systems that link multiple hard drives into one large drive for data control and security.
Over the last week, the Pleasanton district has been doing business the way it did for much of the 20th century, with phone calls and the occasional facsimile.
"We did an auto-dialer last week to all of our households" to let parents know about the system failure, Ahmadi said. She said another auto-dialer will go out when everything is up and running again.
The district's website did not shut down and staff was able to access the Internet through other means, such as personal email addresses, despite the problems with the in-house email system.
Ahmadi said the failure of the disk array forced the district to do something it was planning anyway, but with more planning and a two- to three-month timeframe.
"We were going to move to gmail anyway," Ahmadi said. "At this point, we're in the process of getting all our employees a gmail address."
Instead of having physical servers, the district will use cloud technology, with information stored and accessed through Google servers.
"Our teachers here have been asking to use Google, Google Docs and Google apps," she said.
While it wasn't in the time frame the district hoped for, Ahmadi said information technicians and specialists think the change will be a good one for the district.
Changing to gmail couldn't happen overnight, Cazares said.
"It's a process, to get a new email in place for all our employees," she said.
The district has about 1,200 staff members who each have their own work email address, Ahmadi said. She said district employees are getting briefings on how to use the new system. Many used their personal emails to communicate when the school email system shut down.
At the school board meeting Tuesday night, California School Employees Association representative Calene Fenolio said some employees weren't expected to get their passwords or briefings until next week.
Under the new email system, prefixes will remain the same, using the first initial and last name of the employee. Ahmadi's new email, for example, will be pahmadi@pleasantonusd.net.
District spokeswoman Nicole Stewart said data recovery experts are working to restore the information that may have been lost in the hardware failure. Cazares said the district would probably not know what data or whether it could be retrieved until late in the week.
She said the district is working to get old emails forwarded to Google, and that old email addresses should work again once the problem is fixed.
"What we're hoping is, once we firm up our gmail accounts, we'll be able to flow through," Cazares said.
Meanwhile, teachers and staff have been communicating face to face and over the telephone in kind of a reverse learning curve.
"I felt like I was paralyzed," Ahmadi said. "So much of what we do is technology based. It's been hard to adjust."Are you receiving Express, our free daily e-mail edition? See a sample and sign-up for Express.
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Posted by schoolmom, a resident of the Another Pleasanton neighborhood neighborhood, on Oct 22, 2012 at 9:59 pm Ahmadi said the district did an autodialer to all their households?
I have children at two different schools and did not receive one phone call. Did anyone receive a phone call from the district?
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Posted by Called two times, a resident of the Birdland neighborhood, on Oct 22, 2012 at 10:04 pm I have two students at two different schools and received two calls.
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Posted by Lori, a resident of the Val Vista neighborhood, on Oct 23, 2012 at 8:34 am The schools only call the first person listed on the emergency card. My husband always gets the calls on his mobile.
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Posted by Eleanor, a resident of the Danbury Park neighborhood, on Oct 23, 2012 at 8:34 am I have three students at one school and didn't receive a call. Now this explains why emails to teacher(s) regarding Halloween and carnival planning have gone unanswered. It would have been extremely helpful to have gotten that phone call.
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Posted by olfthfl, a resident of the Pleasanton Meadows neighborhood, on Oct 23, 2012 at 8:37 am I have a student at Foothill and have received several calls since the problem began, the most recent being last evening explaining the "work around".
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Posted by Anil N, a resident of the Vintage Hills Elementary School neighborhood, on Oct 23, 2012 at 10:14 am I have a kid in the elementary school did not receive any call but got an update from the teacher saying they are going to Google mail with there new email cloud service and wanted us to reply if we got the test email.
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Posted by Informed, a resident of the Birdland neighborhood, on Oct 23, 2012 at 2:24 pm Press release on PUSD website: Web Link
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Posted by pTown Lover, a resident of the Amador Estates neighborhood, on Oct 24, 2012 at 3:40 pm If you did not receive any call, suggest you go to school and make sure your information at the school is correct.
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Posted by Cloud?, a resident of the Another Pleasanton neighborhood neighborhood, on Oct 24, 2012 at 9:13 pm The district wants to have email in the 'cloud' on Google Mail. Sounds very secure folks. Would any IT director would ever agree to having corporate email run on Gmail? Does PUSD have an IT director or have they left?
Maybe all those boxes of toxic orange goo the district was serving kids as part of meatless monday - the uber healthy chips and cheeze whiz meal - was stored in the server room and the orange goo leaked. The server disk array could not survive its onslaught and all data in its path was destroyed. 'Attack of the Killer Tomatoes' becomes 'Attack of the Toxic Goo.'
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Posted by Anne, a resident of the Del Prado neighborhood, on Oct 25, 2012 at 8:33 am One kid at the high school, and two phone calls to the house! Appreciated the updates!
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Posted by Dear Cloud?, a member of the Foothill High School community, on Oct 25, 2012 at 10:43 am Many Fortune 500 companies have moved from or are in the process of moving from traditional email servers and costly Blackberry servers to using Google mail. Web Link
BTW - I received 2 sets of calls for 2 children to 2 different phones along with an email from the newsletter editor for each school. We've come to rely on instant email communication, so I'm sure it was a tough week for PUSD. Thanks for the GREAT alternative communication PUSD, Foothill and Hart! And welcome to Google mail!
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