Tuesday 26 August 2008

Viral spread of webmail...

Back in April I blogged about how, for students at least, email had come to mean webmail.  

Well we've seen an interesting phenomenon. Our current public webmail system is Sun Java Communications Suite 5 using the UWC client, but we also ran up the new version 6 (Convergence) on a test system a few weeks ago to see how it went and to play with it internally. We didn't bother protecting it, or restricting access, as we were wanting to do some user testing on the interface.

Well we've certainly got that. Somehow, even before we've started any formal testing of the system the url has leaked out and spread through the student community with sixty or seventy people logged into it at any time during the day. I think we might have got user acceptance ...

[if you're interested in Convergence, Sun have a demo system. You will need a username and password. I don't think they're very secret, either your local Sun account manager can get you them or else look on the Sun Communications suite website : at a pinch mail me]

4 comments:

dgm said...

The username and password are already in the public domain so I guess the following is safe enough: username: field1 :: password: cosmo

dgm said...

There's a backgrounderonline as well ...

Anonymous said...

I just get a "Java...loading.." screen, which sums up my experience with Sun's java apps nicely.

dgm said...

works for me with safari Version 3.1.2 (5525.20.1) with the 1.3 java plugin and various versions of firefox plus java all the way back to firefox 1.5 on ubuntu 6.06 ppc on the rattly old linuxified imac on a home adsl connection ...