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Enron Mail |
Over the past few weeks, we have experienced significant issues with our em=
ail environment that have caused business interruptions and frustration for= Outlook users. The purpose of this e-mail is to outline the issues that w= e have encountered and what we are doing to resolve the issues.=20 ?=09During the last week of August, we encountered a bug in Microsoft's Exc= hange Server -- the mail server that is used by Outlook clients. This bug,= which impacted approximately 3,000 users, delayed mail delivery for the be= tter part of a day. At that time, we applied a fix from Microsoft which ap= pears to have resolved the problem. We have carefully monitored the Exchan= ge servers for four weeks, and have not seen a re-occurrence of the bug. ?=09Also during the last week of August, another Exchange Server experience= d database corruption issues -- again, this impacted approximately 3,000 Ou= tlook users. To resolve this, we moved the 3,000 users to different Exchan= ge servers and made several hardware/software upgrades to the affected serv= er. We have not yet returned the repaired server to full production use --= we are closely monitoring it to ensure that there are no more problems wit= h the server. While this event did not cause e-mail outages during the bus= iness week, we had to do maintenance on the server during the evenings on W= ednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and throughout the Labor day weekend to mov= e users to different servers. During these evenings and weekend, the impac= ted users could not access their e-mail. ?=09During the last three weeks, there have been a number of new and danger= ous viruses on the internet. We have a multi-layered defense against virus= es that include virus scanning software on servers and desktops. All mail = is scanned on the Exchange servers and all files are scanned on the desktop= s. During the last few weeks, we have had to apply numerous virus scanning= updates to the Exchange servers - sometimes even several updates per day. = The result is that when new virus scanning updates arrive, the performance= of the Exchange servers diminishes for several hours while the anti-virus = product rescans every message in every mailbox. This is unfortunate, but w= e believe necessary to prevent viruses from causing outages in the Enron co= mputing environment and threaten our revenue generating systems. At this t= ime, we are working with the vendor to arrive at a technical solution that = will speed up the virus scanning process. We have made some progress as th= e performance has improved during virus scans, however, it can continue to = get better. There is no question that the email issues we have encountered over the las= t few weeks are unacceptable. We are continuing to monitor and improve the= overall performance to ensure that we substantially reduce the outages and= meet Enron's business needs and expectations. Enron Global Technology
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