As of Sunday morning, our IT provider has transferred about 60% of our critical programs to a “virtual’ server. A virtual server is one that does not reside in our building. I would guess we have about 75% functionality at this point. So far it appears all our data backups worked. As I said previously, we were in the middle of a two month effort of testing whether switching to a virtual server would satisfy our needs when the system failure happened. One of the main reasons for going to a virtual server is to prevent what has just happened to us from happening!
Several of you have asked exactly what happened. To my best knowlege, the software that tied our networks together failed. It appears it was a Microsoft glitch that Microsoft themselves can’t figure out. They’ve never seen anything like our glitch and had been working with our IT provider over the last two months to attempt to figure it out. They spent all day Thursday trying to get the server’s software to work, with no luck. Did I hear someone say “Apple”?
With that said, my biggest frustration today is that our email situation has gone from bad to worse. For a while yesterday I was able to retrieve and respond to the 200 emails waiting in my inbox. As of this morning I cannot access emails and any emails sent to us are bouncing. Fortunately, the website and blog were not affected. The email function associated with the blog is independent of our internal email system, so that is why you are receiving this email.
Another big problem is that we have not been able to access our calendars since Wednesday, which really makes things difficult. Our Blackberrys are not functioning, either. Words cannot explain my frustration.
They are hoping things will be functioning for business tomorrow, however, I am not optimistic that will happen. Until further notice, if you need to communicate with us use my gmail account at kahler.richard@gmail.com, or call the office at 605-343-1400, or my cell phone at 605-390-7563.
