Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

We had another extremely busy and exciting year (We are putting together the Annual Report and it is really amazing how much we have done in the past year!). So, it is time to start planning for the next year…

At the Director’s retreat in April, we talked about the departmental goals for the upcoming year and here they are:

• Help implement PeopleSoft Financials in collaboration with the Finance and Administration office. The target Go Live date is July 1, 2009 and we are already off to a great start.
• Improve the Classroom and Public Lab support.
• WesFiles rollout
• Server and Application Virtualization

PeopleSoft Financials  - As you all are aware, we will be moving from FRS to PeopleSoft Financials durinng 2008-2009. This is a major and complex conversion. We have chosen SmartERP as the consultants and are very confident that we can work with them to accomplish the conversion on time. We are constrained by the fact that several key components of the financial systems have to go live on July 1 (the start of a new fiscal year). There is absolutely no room for compromise on this date! Of course there are a few other components that can wait for a month or two. At the kickoff meeting, we heard the rough plan and the steering committee met yesterday to go over some preliminary items. Overall, we all feel positive about the consultants so far and there is a lot of optimism in the air… Barbara and Dan, who will be the technical leads for the project have already moved to North College. Though this will be primarily an administrative systems project, it will certainly require the help of TSS and this new system and associated business processes will affect a lot of us in the way we do business.

Improve Classroom and Public Lab Support – Our multimedia classrooms and other presentation locations are used heavily and the usage and reliance on the services there is only going to increase. There were a few incidences during the past year (I was told that this is not unusual) when problems with the classroom hardware did not work properly resulting in loss of teaching time. In addition, some users were turning off devices to save energy, which affected the one that follows. I have asked that we prepare a detailed plan that improves the classroom support that includes better training for the students who are the first line support, spread the support geographically (using mapping tools and PeopleSoft class meeting times), so that someone can be dispatched to the problem location sooner, better use of network monitoring tools to detect hardware failures or powering off and finally better tracking of problems. Teaching and Learning is the lifeline of the institution and as scary as it may sound, there is an expectation that the multimedia classrooms and the network are functional when the classes are in session.  Public Lab support again needs to be re-assessed. The current way of maintaining and pushing images is too labor intensive and fraught with serious problems. We will be looking at application virtualization, virtual lab and use of thin clients etc as alternates where applicable.

WesFiles Rollout – WesFiles has been rolled out to all the students and many faculty members. ITS staff have also been moved. There is considerable interest from several administrative staff to start moving to this, so we will help facilitate this in the upcoming year. We are waiting for the next version of WesFiles to go into production in summer and this has a vastly improved web interface and some of the bugs have been fixed. Many of those who use this have expressed that this is vastly superior what they have had and the power to collaborate alone is worth it. This again will involve many of the ITS staff members in one way or the other.

Server and Application Virtualization – We made significant progress on the server virtualization last year and we are going to be moving to this more aggressively. We are arranging for staff to get trained in VMWare and will be purchasing additional hardware to implement this more aggressively so some of the older blades can be retired. As I wrote earlier, I feel that Application Virtualization has a lot of potential and we need to take advantage of this and look at ways to optimize the support time involved in managing the rollout of desktop applications.

As always, remember that these are just broader goals for the upcoming year. I expect all the ITS staff to actively participate in advancing one or more of these goals. So, let us get started!!!