The Computer Services Help Desk Hours of Operation are:

8:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., Monday through Friday and

8:00 a.m. to Noon on Saturdays

For your convenience, we are open during the lunch hour.

There has been some confusion regarding the new security policy regarding your mobile phone and accessing Rockhurst email.

Our goal is never to limit the usability of any technology resource, but seek to create an environment where our information resources are secured. After feedback from the university community we have scaled back the requirements in order to maintain that balance between security and usability.

The minimum security requirement for mobile devices is now a 4 digit PIN (numbers only) code. However, users can choose to use a more complex password like the previous requirements, only if they desire.

We want to stress the importance of this policy in helping to protect critical email and user data, however we do not want to limit the ability to use mobile devices or create an environment where users choose not to sync with Rockhurst email because of the complexity requirements. Please keep in mind that the Rockhurst data on your mobile device is your responsibility. We need to be notified immediately if your phone is lost or stolen and then we can remotely wipe all the data stored on your phone. This will return the device to a "like new" state.

Over Spring Break we updated the configuration on the thin clients in our computer labs. Please note these important changes.

• The issue of Mathematica being missing from the SPSS version of the image has been corrected.
• There are now multiple “Start Windows XP” images to select from. This spreads out the number of images among multiple pools, so if a student gets locked out of one pool they should still be able to login to another. Right now the A and B pools are online, with a C pool coming online later tomorrow morning.
• The EDU image has not been changed.
• http://help.rockhurst.edu/labs/software has been updated.

If you have any questions or issues please contact our office.

We have recently migrated our spam filtering system to a new service called Microsoft Forefront Online Protection for Exchange. You may begin to notice that you're receiving spam quarantine notifications from this new service. These messages will come from the address "quarantine@messaging.microsoft.com" and will contain the Microsoft Forefront logo at the top.

Please review the content of these notification messages, if you see something that has been trapped by the quarantine that you're sure is a legitimate message, you can press the "Not Junk" button next to the message. This will train the spam filter not to block this message in the future, and deliver it to your Inbox. If you are unsure and want to review the message, clicking on "Move to Inbox" will deliver the message but not affect future filtering.

If you see messages in the quarantine that you do not want delivered, simply ignore them and they will be removed from your quarantine after 15 days.

Beginning this Friday at 9:00 AM, we will begin enforcing security requirements on mobile phones connected to our infrastructure. As phone technology becomes more advanced, it has become necessary for us to being treating them just as we would any other computer connected to Rockhurst resources. This change will allow us to better protect access to campus resources such as email, contact and calendar information, but it will also help protect our users phone, text messaging and other information from abuse by unknown and unauthorized persons.

These requirements will apply to any university owned OR any personal mobile device that connects to our mail server using the Exchange ActiveSync technology.

This new policy only applies to faculty or staff that sync with our on-premise mail system. Students who have devices connected to Microsoft Outlook Live (Exchange Labs) are not bound by this policy change, although we encourage users to use a PIN or other security device on their phones.

Over the past few days we have had some e-mail issues where individuals here were unable to receive messages sent to them by some off-campus e-mail addresses. We have been working with our Internet service providers since Tuesday to try to solve the problem and thankfully the problem is now resolved. There was an issue with one of Morenet’s routers that was preventing us from getting e-mail from these specific sites.

We apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. You should now be receiving these missing e-mails from the last few days. Be sure to notice once the message is open, that the sent date and time is actually for when the message was originally sent.

If by tomorrow you are missing any e-mails that you were expecting to receive, please contact the sender and ask them to resend the message.

Towards the end of last week we pushed out a Microsoft security update, KB979352, for Internet Explorer that corrected a major vulnerability in Windows/IE. This patch corrected a problem in Windows that allow malicious sites to execute remote code or crash Internet Explorer. This vulnerability made news in the last couple weeks as being part of the attack that was launched against Google by China.

As you may have experienced, since then we’ve started getting reports from users not being allowed to use Adobe Reader to load PDF documents. We’ve seen and tested this issue with various configurations including Windows XP, Windows 7, Adobe Reader 8, Adobe Reader 9, Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer, etc. This error happens to any of these types of systems, only after the patch is installed.

We do not believe that this issue is caused by the recent upgrade to Adobe Reader 9 that was also pushed to campus systems last week, as the issue seems to be present in Adobe Reader 8 (the previously installed version) as well. It is just an unfortunate coincidence.

Rockhurst University will have a late start of 10:30am on Thursday morning due to inclement weather, as a result the Help Desk will not be open until that time. If weather conditions deteriorate more than forecast, then Rockhurst may ultimately close for business on Thursday, and we would announce such closing as we normally do via the local television stations, the main website, by calling the main number at 816-501-4000, by calling Security dispatch at 816-501-4010 and/or receiving a Textcaster message.

The Help Desk will also close at 3:00pm on January 6.