Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

As we start preparing our Annual Report for the current academic year, it will become apparent that we successfully completed many projects and are working on many more interesting and important projects. In our last Director’s retreat, we discussed the issue of project creep and apparent lack of focus. We decided that it would help formulate a general theme for where our efforts should be directed during the next year.
We believe we have been extremely successful in accomplishing our previous major goal of web centric Wesleyan. Over the past few years, we have moved almost all of the university business to the web. Electronic Portfolio is now well adapted all around the campus and it is in the vocabulary of everyone. It has provided the framework for us to try to bring together all our web applications despite the fact that the backend tools are vastly different.Our recent initiatives all have the common goal of simplifying what our users do and possibly move many more of the traditional desktop function to the web. We would like our collective efforts therefore to be in the following areas:

• Web 2.0 – We strongly believe that the Web 2.0 tools such as the blogs, wikis, and webtop productivity software will not only help us move more to the web, but it will simplify the management and task of content greatly. We have already launched this project and we expect this to take a significant time to package and implement.

• Content Management – The number of different data stores available to our users creates a lot of confusion and we plan to roll this software out which consolidates and greatly simplifies the management of the content through web interfaces and webdav protocol. We expect the initial rollout to be implemented in the Fall. There are many other initiatives such as visual resources project, catalog of the future, and institution repository pilot which all tie into this theme.

• E-mail reconfiguration – We will offer the ability for students to opt to move their email to Google Apps for education; we will move all the non-Meeting Maker users to Cyrus IMAP and encourage the use of WebMail and IMAP; we will implement outlook/exchange for meeting maker users in keeping up with the theme of consolidation. Whereas the first two items will simplify both the backend and the user access, the outlook/exchange will not be initially seen as simplification by several users. However, in the end, the combined email, calendar and tasks will result in greater efficiencies.

• PeopleSoft Upgrade – We will be completing a major and year long upgrade of PeopleSoft in the summer and we expect considerable resources spent on continued support and development under the new system.

• New Financial System Research – We will begin researching a new financial system for implementation towards either the later part of next year or early during 2008/2009. We have received end of life notice for FRS, so this will be our major initiative for a few years to come. Obviously, we want the new system to be Web-based and simple to use and understand.

• Student Advisory – As discussed in Ravi’s blog we feel that we are losing an opportunity in consulting our students about the systems we develop for their use. We would like a formal way to engage them so that we package our products in a way that is simple and easy to use, but from an 18-22 year old?s perspective.

• Research and Scholarly Communications – The success of QAC during the first year is something we will build on going forward. We will also invest the required resources to support the high performance cluster for research, simplifying the systems management tasks so that the faculty and their support staff can devote their efforts to do research.

Please note that what is listed here are the major initiatives and there are many other projects that are in some form or the other connected to the general theme of webification and simplification. Please note that the primary goal is to simplify the user experience. Since many of these initiatives are complex transitions, our own work in the back end may not be simplified during these transitions. Our hope is, in the end, even the backend support will be simplified.