A few months ago, I set up a BlackBerry for a Curry College student so he could use it to get his email. This worked fine up until a few weeks ago, when BlackBerry informed the student that his account information needed to be revalidated. Revalidation failed, so I took a look at it.

All the settings looked reasonable and were as I'd left them. However, a quick look at the servers showed that they no longer accepted connections from email clients, including the POP3 service the BlackBerry had used. I thought that was odd, so I called Curry College IT to ask what was going on.

Curry College IT told me that external email clients, such as BlackBerrys, had become so popular that their servers couldn't handle the load, so they simply cut off everyone's access. The rep told me that although they were planning to expand server capacity, they would not be restoring external access.

Curry College IT's attitude galls me. They are in the business of providing services to their customers. In this case, the customers are the students, and the students have specific ways they work and which work best for them. By cutting off--effectively banning--useful, real-world tools and forcing students to use the college's webmail system, Curry is failing to meet key customer needs and is instead dictating to the students what it feels is best for them. This attitude wouldn't be tolerated in the real world, except in some corporate environments...the key difference being that corporations pay their employees and expect a degree of compliance in return.

Curry should re-think the way it delivers both its services and its customer service in order to best serve its clientele. It should be offering services that are compatible with the way students work in order to best meet their needs.