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From Student Affairs and Enrollment Services

Laura A. Wankel, Ed.D., Vice President
Division of Student Affairs and Enrollment Services
400 South Orange Avenue
South Orange, New Jersey 07079-2684
Tel: 973-761-9075 Fax: 973-275-9797

At Seton Hall, one of our core community values is a recognition of the inherent dignity of each and every person. Unfortunately, not everyone shares our values. I am writing to you today to address the issue of the JuicyCampus website. As most of you know, JuicyCampus allows people to anonymously post comments about their institutions and their colleagues. Much of what is posted on the JuicyCampus website is hate speech and it is only worthy of condemnation.

As an institution, the University does not have any means at its disposal to realistically restrict access to the JuicyCampus website. However, that does not mean that we are powerless as a community.

First of all, I would ask all members of our community to avoid the website. The owners of the site make their money from advertising, and that source of revenue will soon dry up if no one is viewing their content. Second, keep in mind that this situation is an illustration of the tremendous power of speech. Words can hurt, but words can also heal. If you know of someone who has been hurt by something posted on the site, please reach out to them and let them know that you are there for them. Finally, if you think that a crime has been committed by the owners of the website (for example, by allowing the posting of personal contact information), please feel free to contact the office of the New Jersey Attorney General to file a complaint (http://www.state.nj.us/lps/).

Seton Hall has a mission to foster an environment of respect for all persons. This is part of why you chose to come here. This is a mission that requires that we all agree to do our part by living the values that we claim to hold. Thank you for all your efforts to strengthen our community by keeping Seton Hall a "home for the mind, the heart and the spirit."

Beginning approximately 8:00 AM this morning, Sunday, October 12, University IT Services began receiving reports that some campus systems were not available, including the campus Web site (www.shu.edu) and Blackboard.

Testing showed that the outage was intermittent and depended on users' Internet Service Provider (ISP). Users of Comcast and Verizon were able to access campus servers from off campus, while users of AT&T and Optimum Online were not. Blackboard login was affected by this intermittant outage.

The University's Internet vendor, Level3, identified a problem with one of their circuits, and corrected the problem. Full service was restored approximately 1:30 PM this afternoon.

Steve Landry, CIO

Seton Hall University is completing a complete revamp of its Web site. This revamp has been led by a steering committee including faculty and administrators and the work has been done by a cross functional team from Public Relations and IT. The new Web site being constructed uses new technologies, including the CommmonSpot Web Content Management System for academic and administrative Web pages, Microsoft Expression for personal Web pages, and the Banner Luminis portal system for pages that require user login to access. As this work progresses, University IT Services will decommission the old Microsoft FrontPage Web servers. The current schedule for decommissioning the old MS FrontPage Web servers is as follows:

• On Wednesday, December 24th, at 12:01 AM, the MS FrontPage Web servers will become "read only." They will continue to serve Web pages to the Internet, but users will not have the ability to update or modify those Web pages.
• On Sunday, March 29th, at 12:01 AM, the MS FrontPage Web servers will be removed from the campus network. After that time, Web pages residing on the MS FrontPage Web servers will not be accessible from the Internet.

Any department or organization that still has Web pages on the MS FrontPage server should contact Marie Somers, Director of Web Development in University IT Services, at 973-761-7566 or via email at somersma@shu.edu as soon as possible to make arrangements to have those Web pages moved to one of the current Web servers.

This weekend University IT Services (UITS) and the Cross Functional Web Team (a joint team comprised of members of IT and PR) began a major software upgrade of the University's Web site. During this upgrade, minimal changes to the University's Web site will be made.

The upgrades include upgrading to the latest version of CommonSpot (the University's Web Content Management System) and ColdFusion (the Web programming language in which CommonSpot is written), as well as the underlying Oracle database which holds the content elements for the University's Web site.

This upgrade will provide additional features for the University's Web site, including greater integration with other University information sources, such as the Banner administrative system and the Luminis portal. This will allow the University to more easily distribute information via the Web from Banner and other official information sources.

During the next two weeks the Cross Functional Web team needs to minimize updates and changes to the University's Web site in order to complete the upgrade.