Evaluation of the Project
This assignment was actually a very enlightening experience for our group. While we began this project thinking that there are many problems with Old Dominion University's email system, by the end we found that the system is not that bad. By doing research through the school's website and gaining insight from others, we found numerous pages with help information on the system that we did not know initially existed. Not only were we informed about how to fix certain problems with the system, for example loading the java applet, we were also told how we could make our email systems better. We discovered that ODU offers an alternative email system that anyone can switch to simply by emailing OCCS. Doing this assignment certainly changed our opinions about ODU's email system. We have a greater respect for the amount of work that it takes to create and manage email systems, especially for a large institution like Old Dominion University.
With our particular topic of email, it was a little difficult for us to find information from the first two texts that we read in class. While email was mentioned briefly in both books, the context in which it was talked about was not really helpful to our research problem. This part of the assignment was difficult for us, as we did not quite know how to incorporate some of this information.
Initially our group thought that the email system was a good topic for this project. However, as we got deeper into our research and attempted to construct more of the website we began to change our minds about our topic. We feel that if we could do this project again that we would choose a different topic to research. It was difficult to find information on certain aspects of this assignment, and we feel that with a different topic would have made our research efforts more productive.
Overall we found this assignment to be a learning experience. We gained new insight into the workings of ODU's email system, as well as other email systems that are in use. We discovered the difficulties that the school faces in managing this system, and earned a new respect and level of patience for the system that is in place. We also learned the utter importance of having email as a communication tool, as we constantly used the system to contact each other throughout the course of this assignment.