By Esteban Ramirez
Editor-in-Chief
The new email for CSU Bakersfield appeared to be a good idea for students, however, many students have faced problems with it.
According to Associate Vice-President and Chief Information Officer Faust Gorham said that students have had the biggest issue with the changing of the password and that students need to know how to use.
“A current disadvantage we are facing is the entire self-service-password-reset process,” said Gorham. “Since we implemented Office 365, there was an unexpected issue with not having the ability to reset the password, so we had a whole bunch of students call us at the help desk. That’s one serious disadvantage that we have been having.”
On Sept. 25, Gorham sent out an email to CSUB students stating that “in troubleshooting the self-service password reset option within our
Microsoft Office 365 environment an unexpected change occurred which
affected all passwords. Your Runner email account was most certainly
affected.” He added that students should use the MyCSUB or Blackboard password to login to the Runner email account.
He said that they are trying to solve the problem with the password by linking the MyCSUB password with the email password.
“An unanticipated change happened when our support team was working with Microsoft when all of a sudden all the passwords have synched from what we used to access MyCSUB for Office 365,” he said. “We’re putting messaging in the self-service portal, so that our students know to use their MyCSUB credentials as opposed to using another password.”
According to a data chart from Sept. 18, which was provided by Gorham, there have been over 6,000 students that have logged in, but it still leaves over 3,000 that haven’t logged in.
“I would like to increase that number to almost all of them,” Gorham said.
He added that a couple more changes they want to make is once you login to one of the applications, students will be able login to all of them. The other thing they want to do is increase the support for mobile.
Despite the struggles for the email’s password, Gorham said that the email has had plenty of benefits.
“We have kind of done two things: we moved ourselves up a level of sophistication, so before we may have been operating on dirt roads now we are kind of on a highway,” he said. “We kind of changed the level of how we have to work, and two, we also have the students advantage, which means that Word, Excel and any of the PowerPoint tools can essentially be brought on and installed in devices. You can install in your laptop or your desktop at home and run these tools as opposed of just using the web versions of those tools.”
He added that there were two other positives. The other positive is that the email system has 50 gigabytes of storage, and the other positive is that it allows students to know how to communicate with every student.
Eric Nickerson, who is a junior and marketing major, said he is having trouble accessing it through his phone.
“I’m having an issue because I can’t access is through my phone,” he said. “My Runner ID is not working and it’s a problem because we can’t get in contact with teachers, might be late to class and don’t know about assignments.”
Nickerson suggested that they should provide a step-by-step process of using the email.
Itzi Andrade, who a junior and undecided major, said that the email has a lot of bugs.
“It’s not working,” Andrade said. “The logins haven’t been working and it could be the infrastructure in the server or something else. I mean Bakersfield College has an email system that works so I would expect CSUB to have one that works too.”
