Earlier this semester there were many issues with the Skidmore Calendar, Skidmore EMS (room scheduling website) and the Library reservation system. As a student, some days I would have no trouble accessing all three of these calendars and reservation systems, yet other days I would never be able to get the pages to load. Thankfully, these issues have since been fixed and I am no longer having problems.
When I was having these issues, I reached out to Skidmore Information Technology (IT) to figure out what the issues were and ultimately to make sure they were aware that students were having these problems. If we as a student body never alert them, they might not ever know there are issues. After a series of email exchanges with Tom Marcotte, Director of IT Strategic Planning and Communications, he told me that this issue “started as a DNS issue with Time Warner. During the course of our troubleshooting, we noticed that many links to the EMS calendar system pointed to ems.skidmore.edu, which is not our preferred way of accessing it.” Skidmore changed many links that had been ems.skidmore.edu to calendar.skidmore.edu, their preferred way of accessing it.
This change fixed many of the problems, but after doing this, IT found out that the server calendar.skidmore.edu could not be accessed through a firewall that was in place between the residence halls and campus. This meant that students still could not access the calendar from their residence hall. IT eventually fixed this problem and Marcotte said, “we got the added bonus of ending up a little more secure as well.”
Many, including myself, also had problems with reserving library rooms. “This was caused by a problem with the configuration file that basically tells the “overlay” system how and where to get the room information from the EMS system,” said Marcotte. IT was able to fix the configuration file and get the system back up and running.
If you find yourself still having problems accessing the calendar and reservation systems, IT asked to make sure you are not going to ems.skidmore.edu and instead are going to calendar.skidmore.edu. Marcotte also said that anyone still having trouble should talk to the Help Desk at the library so they can look into the matter. It is you who can help to make sure that Skidmore is aware of these problems!