This week, CITES implemented an overhaul on both the Express E-Mail and Netfiles services for members of the University community.

Students can now hold up to 100 MB in their inbox (nearly a seven-fold increase); faculty and staff can now hold as much as 150 MB.

The updated Express E-mail also allows users to have their newest messages displayed at the top of their inbox and provides message delivery confirmation. The NetFiles service now allows all members of the University, including staff and students, to hold up to 500 MB of information. NetFiles allows for personal files to be stored on University servers and accessed via the web.

“The recent upgrades are indicative of our efforts and our determination to help improve the service that we provide to our faculty and students on campus,” said Chief Informational Officer Paula Kaufman, “It’s CITES’ mission to provide the most effective communication network possible for educational research and outreach.”

According to Randal F. Cetin, director of Systems and Technology Services, the decision to increase the e-mail and NetFiles quota was based on information from a number of sources, Cetin said that two advisory boards, one comprised mostly of faculty and the other entirely of students, conveyed a clear message that an increase in information storage was “essential to the academic mission of the campus.”

Data from the CITES Help Desk also indicated that users frequently encountered problem with these services because of limited storage, Cetin said.

The earlier 15 MB quota became problematic and frustrating for professors and students who missed important messages because they had gone over their quota. For NetFiles, which has seen rapid growth in use, the upgrade to 500 MB came when space became a limiting factor in the service. Once the decision to upgrade was made, one of the technical challenges faced by the CITES team was increasing the capacity to back up all the data on a nightly basis.

In addition to the Express E-mail and Netfiles upgrades, CITES is also planning some larger changes in the coming years.

According to Mike Smeltzer, Director of Network Communications, the University has purchased some fiber-optic cables that form a ring connecting the Champaign, Springfield and Chicago campuses, which all carry high speed internet.

” We have two 1 GB connections,” Smeltzer said. “After this upgrade, there will be two 10 GB connections, increasing total bandwith tenfold.”

Testing on the fiber-optic ring will begin in October, with production services beginning in the early half of 2007. One of the reasons for this upgrade was to improve the collaboration and communication between professors and researchers located on different campuses.

“There are researchers who need very low latency to move large data sets or interactive video between multiple locations,” Smeltzer said. “A researcher on campus here could be collaborating with a researcher in Argon labs in Chicago as easily as if the two were sitting right next to each other. This will be a major milestone for the University”

CITES is also currently working to update its wireless service. Focusing on lecture halls and the internal public spaces, CITES is currently working on installing or expanding wireless service in a number of places, including the Armory, the English Building, 608 S. Wright St., and the Foreign Language Building, 707 S. Matthews Ave.

This expansion is fueled by the development of a new technology called “Meru,” which allows over 600 users to use one wireless access point, as opposed to only 40 or 50, Smeltzer said.

“I would invite people to let us know what else they need and to share their feedback on the developments,” Kaufman offered.