A couple things happened at the same time in the last couple of days. I desperately needed to communicate with MSU HR using an
msu.edu address, and WIlliam Safire died.
Increasingly MSU treats e-mail as official. It's really important to be able to forward your MSU e-mail to a professional service, as opposed to
mail.msu.edu. Since
mail.msu.edu is amateur, MSU needs to make it easy to forward to a professional service.
I literally spent an hour trying to figure out how to set forwarding in the new
mail.msu.edu interface. I may not be the sharpest knife in the drawer, but I could not discern how to accomplish a simple task that MSU requires thousands to complete.
When I wrote MSU's first e-mail system in 1983, it was state of the art. That's because there was no art. It was primitive. We had no clue. That was 1983. It is 2009. We should be smarter now. I wasn't around when MSU chose its current e-mail system. But to bury a vital function such as forwarding -- which is now an essential thinig, which MSU demands -- under an obscure tab labeled "MSU Prefs"-- this is not just primitive. It is incompetent.
It also took more than 24 hours for my former colleagues at ATS to cough up simple information vital to me -- how do I set forwarding in this poor interface. We were better at FAQs in 1957 than we are in 2009. My colleagues are good people but the standard of service is poor. Questions should be answered in minutes, not days. And if the primary campus e-mail service hides forwarding under a label of "MSU Prefs" given a ribbon bar of normal options for the app, there is a problem.
