Schools ICT supplier RM faces a challenge rebuilding customer confidence after a major server problem disconnected email services to thousands of schools users ffor four days. The company made the best possible response with a full apology and explanation from CEO Tim Pearson for the loss of RM EasyMail Plus which hosts some 750,000 user accounts.
He has followed this up with compensation. Schools which get their RM email through a managed service can get compensation through their supplier. However, all the others get a choice and can vote online - they can have, says Tim Pearson, "a credit note amounting to a month's cost of the service, we could give everyone access to some additional service (e.g. a number of free calendar accounts for a year) or, we could add up all of the individual compensations and give it to a children's charity such as the National Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children. If you want to do that, we would give at least £50,000."
RM wasn't the only education organisation experiencing internet problems. The website of the Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) "disappeared" on Friday and came back into service, albeit somewhat arthritic, on Monday.
Part of RM's problem appears to have been spam, up from 550 messages per minute in May 2006 to an astonishing 2,000 per minute in February this year.
As Tim Pearson exlained: "in short, what has happened is the combination of increased spam and increased user sessions at much higher rates than predicted which has, on occasion, overwhelmed the system making it both inefficient and slow." Attempts to rectify the service prompted the unexpected collapse of both the service and its back-up because of a power failure.
By Friday the company was confident the situation was under control with the service being resumed for most users, and RM developing a new fail-safe back-up. A company spokesperson thought that no data would be lost,
Over at Ofsted's digital shopfront, the website "home page", now back in action with inforomation about post-16 plans, had been carrying the message: "The website is experiencing a technical problem. We are sorry for the inconvenience, but we are aware of the problem and hope to restore service as soon as possible." And emails to Ofsted staff are being returned.
Tim Pearson's offer can be found on RM's home page:
www.rm.com
Comment
SeanOSullivan
13 March
How interesting. Here in Oxfordshire our school email system became noticeably constricted since last Tuesday, with nothing getting out, and very little managing to get in either. Oxfordshire runs its own broadband system, called OCN, and the email side is handled by MessageLabs. I'm not sure of the connection with RM, but do know that historically Oxfordshire has been very close to that company. We enter a full week of lost service tomorrow, and are still waiting for staff at the 'Service Desk' to get back to us to clarify the situation.
