Bourne Town Email Service Back Online
After nearly a week of being down, Bourne’s town-wide email communications system is back online thanks to the IT department.
Town officials said last week that the service went down in the early hours on February 14. Efforts to restore the connection were ongoing throughout the week, but the service was still down as of last Friday afternoon. It was restored over the long Presidents Day weekend.
Bourne IT Director Robert Przewozeny said the IT team was working last week to get the system back online following the crash, which he said was caused by corruption in the main database.
“At the time, we had to make a decision,” he said. “Unfortunately, it was a lengthy decision, but once it was back up, I knew that that would be okay. It’s a very large database file; you battle with how long it takes and there’s nothing that you can really do about that.”
Mr. Przewozeny, who was out sick last week in the midst of the problem, spent time working and monitoring the system basically around the clock to ensure its restoration. He said he has seen this kind of crash before, which was helpful when it came to managing the minor town-wide crisis.
“I definitely had an eye on it practically 24/7,” Mr. Przewozeny said. “It was one of those where I tried to tell myself not to check because a watched pot never boils but at the same time, I kept checking routinely so I had updates all the time.”
In a Facebook post to the Bourne Police Department’s page on Sunday, February 19, Police Chief Brandon Esip thanked the town’s IT department for its “diligent effort” to restore the system’s connection.
Luckily, Mr. Przewozeny confirmed, any emails that were sent while the system was down have been delivered successfully to town employees.
“Everything is on the up and up, everything is restored and working,” he said. “Everything came in, everything is at 100 percent.”
The email system for @townofbourne.com is now fully back up and running, with no anticipated interruptions in the future.
Soon, though, Bourne plans to transition its system to Microsoft’s cloud-based Office 365 program. If a crash like this does happen again, Mr. Przewozeny said, downtime would be cut dramatically because the system is anchored to Microsoft.
“So unless Microsoft goes down, we will not have any trouble like that,” he said.
Due to an array of moving parts and careful planning, the switch will likely come early in the next fiscal year.