myLife email address

man, I have to finish up soon. This Unisa's becoming an expensive hobby

Thanks

Expensive indeed I almost got a heart attack when I did the quotation for next year!

still cheaper than other universities

Thats true...

I'm so glad my work is helping me out, as it was ouch and I only took 5 subjects this year.

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Don't Assume Everything is a Nail Just Because You Have a Really Big Hammer

The email service itself is provided by M$ and I know of at least one other university that has also signed on to the program (I’m sure there are more). The only costs to the university is the ILM implementation that syncs the data between the M$ email system and the university’s database so I do not think this will have such a big impact on your fees..

is unisa now going to spam us daily with the stupid email about myLife? I have now received an email everyday for the last 3 days.

helooooo, I may not even be around next year

Celene ,it looks like it. I also got 3 already

> I have now received an email everyday for the last 3 days

> Celene ,it looks like it. I also got 3 already

Hey that's not fair I only received TWO of those emails

Be grateful, I haven't received any

Only a matter of time bini LOL

My guess is that Unisa is getting a whole lot of freebies from Microsoft in exchange for a database of all these future graduates. Plus years of spamming them of course while they are studying.

I think MS must be getting a bit desperate. And I wouldn't put it past Unisa to be accepting money and gifts for keeping the ICDL going also. We'll have .net as a "language" any day now.

its microflops tax break...

When you have a lousy product you HAVE to market like crazy!

My best was a quote from a Microsoft executive about Vista: "It's not THAT bad".

I'm pretty certain that it is possible to get them to reverse this decision, unless they
are willing to pay me to use microsoft services, I highly doubt that it isn't against
university rules to mandate exclusive use of a non-BEEE foreign company to students
when the students themselves have alternatives....

IOW, this may be both unconstitutional and against UNISA offical policy documents - now
to complain would require a careful reading of the policy documents as well as the
rules for BEEE tenders ... which I am willing to do over december if someone can
forward me all the policy documents for UNISA.

Can we say "Racist tender award"? Yeah, I thought so ...

Kind Regards

LOL! you will become a man amongst men if you pull that off!

I'm very used to pulling things like this off, as long as the policy is long enough and
convoluted enough to have been written by lawyers, this can be pulled off quite easily,
someone just needs to send me the UNISA policy documents.

Remember, I've got experience in court, arguing in front of a magistrate

I thought that maybe you can setup your account to forward all your email to your real account. And so it proved

http://mylife.unisa.ac.za/faq.html

And you can just create another profile on your favourite client with your mylife address to use for queries with Unisa.

Maybe this is not such a bad idea after all - with 270 000 + students many email addresses change or is not updated and network traffic is increased when bounces are received? I dare say that this may actually not be a bad move.....???

For example, it covers Unisa so that a student cannot say - I did not receive this or that email when in fact the dog ate it?

it just feels very "big brother"/"1984" to me

@mac - if you got an email from a students gmail account are you just going to ignore it now?

I don't think lecturers are going to flat out ignore emails not sent from the mylife account ?

I also want to know if some places will actually allow access to the mylife login page etc - I know std bank actually blocks access to external email accounts

Standard bank blocks gmail and hotmail as well dont they? They dont block vodacom though....

the block gmail, hotmail, yahoo mail, kalahari (when you have to log in), they block mweb mail.

We have always had email accounts such as cos101@osprey.unisa.ac.za (which we preferred over the unisa addresses since unisa strips the sender details - it arrives here as studentxxx@unisa.ac.za) so I don't think it will affect us as much.

The University is not parting with their student database.

I have heard from a reliable source that the University gets lots of bounces on fake or incorrect/outdated student email addresses. Anybody who has to maintain a customer database knows that this is a universal problem.

This is a good enough reason for providing students with an email address which the University knows will not change.

Furthermore, the university has clearly stated that you can configure the account to forward or redirect all university communications to whatever email address you prefer. This means that you can actually set it up so that when redirected emails arrive at your own private or work email address, they will look like they were sent directly to your account (yes, you don't actually have to use the myLife account other than to automatically forward Unisa communications to you).

I don't know about Unisa, but at other universities where they have/are busy implementing similar facilities, the students will also be using these usernames and passwords to log on to workstations in the labs.

As far as finances goes, it makes sense for them to take this route... If the University had to provide all its students with 10Gb email accounts (or even just 1Gb), using its own hosting infrastructure and staff, they would have had to invest several million (which would undoubtedly reflect on your study fees). If you know a little about the costs of running a Storage Area Network or similar system with Tera or Petabytes of space, requiring both redundancy and daily backups, you would know what I'm talking about. The University would also have had to upgrade its Internet bandwidth – I have seen the prices for such upgrades and its ridiculous (in this country at least).


SBTW, Google is also offering a similar service to Universities.

An interesting aside - I activated my MyLife account - it isn't optimised for Firefox. Basically to get to functionality like the rules you need to forward email, you'll have to use IE!

The Firefox view is a basic but functional subset. The IE view is like a web view of Outlook 2007. Agonisingly slow.

I set mine to forward automatically to gmail - who will weed out the spam. They asked for my cell phone number - I gave the wrong one and it worked fine.

Copy and paste the password into notepad first - it has hidden spaces.

Quote
hexium
The email service itself is provided by M$ and I know of at least one other university that has also signed on to the program (I’m sure there are more). The only costs to the university is the ILM implementation that syncs the data between the M$ email system and the university’s database so I do not think this will have such a big impact on your fees..

Sure no extra fees. Until the university starts being obliged to do other things such as offer microsoft courses and make them compulsory and the student then pays a fortune for those.

Honestly how naive are people :/

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"Knowledge has much better uses than self-pity and superiority"

And you're basing that comment on what exactly?

Based on analysis of exactly how Microsoft has behaved over the last 20 years[1] and on analysis of businesses in general.

What do you think they do stuff like this for, to try get a warm fuzzy feeling inside?

Keep in mind as well that it was just a few months ago that it came out that from next year UNISA was no longer going to give out Microsoft OS licenses to students.
See here if you don't believe me.
Coincidence? I highly doubt it... Let's wait and see though

[1] This is the same company whose CEOs "charity" gives large donations to countries who at the same time mysteriously pull out of deals with open source competitors and sign big deals with them...

--
"Knowledge has much better uses than self-pity and superiority"

Well since a lot of universities do not use any of the M$ programming languages, this should be an ideal way to market their languages and platform. We may get courses based on using C# , or VB (the horror).

@malcolm - So, according to your link, the department can still make the software available for certain modules (should it be a requirement to complete those modules) but due to the additional administrative requirements, they no longer do it. I hope that wasn't your smoking gun because its pointing in the opposite direction. I would also like to see credible references on your other statement regarding the charity organization.

@Shauntir - Here are a few examples of Universities who also utilize M$ languages in some of their courses (this is by no means an exhaustive list):
Rodes University - C#
University of Pretoria - C#
University of Johannesburg - C#
University of the Free State - C#
Durban University of Technology - Visual Basic
University of Fort Hare - Visual Basic, Visual C++
Most of these Universities also teach Java and C++ of course (and probably a few other languages as well)