Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

I am sure that everyone is getting ready for the Thanksgiving holidays and planning for the special family gatherings on Thursday. We have always hosted Thanksgiving at our house and invite a lot of friends. There are some regulars who are like family to us. And yes, we do cook Turkey, but our Thanksgiving is truly a fusion affair – a lot of vegetarian food of all kinds as well as non-vegetarian including Turkey. And Turkey is cooked with a lot of Indian spices, like Tandoori. We have so much fun and we all look forward to it…

What I really wanted to write was a about the many things that the ITS staff are working on in addition to the day-to-day responsibilities. Since we did not have the opportunity to get updates from the Directors during the staff meeting, I thought this will be a good time to do this. The items are listed in random order and though I mention only some names, it is always the case that each and every one of them will have many staff members from ITS working on them. Don’t be shy to comment if I left anything obvious.

• Karen has been working very hard to revamp our training program and we will be announcing a very aggressive two week training in Microsoft Office suite of programs in January. Based on the interest that we have seen, we expect these classes to fill quickly.
• The new PeopleSoft Financial systems implementation is proceeding well. Ed Below is leading the coordination of all aspects of the project and the staff from Finance and Administration are working really hard on the functional aspects while Barbara, Dan, Steve W, Tom and Steve M are contributing from the ITS side. This will really pick up steam in the next few weeks.
• Desktop Support Staff and TSS are planning to roll out Thin Clients to a couple of departments in early to mid December. This is really exciting development on various fronts. We are waiting for the installation of the necessary software on the server side before proceeding further.
• TSS staff have completed the evaluation of VTL (Virtual Tape Library) and we are ready to move on to the implementation of this, which, we plan to begin in December, but may be postponed to early January because of the vacations. This will help bring tremendous efficiencies to our TSM backups and restores.
• Jolee and Karen, in collaboration with the WSA-ITS committee consisting of students are leading the efforts to migrate the student emails to Google Apps for Education in January. There are many staff members in TSS who are doing the actual implementation.
• Academic Computing staff are working on many initiatives such as Faculty Websites using Wordpress blogs, WesScholar institutional repository in collaboration, and the use of Sympodium interactive pen displays in classrooms.
• Thanks to all the extra efforts that have been put into the classrooms, we have received far less complaints from faculty on classroom IT issues this semester than in the recent past. This is an area where we are determined to keep our focus because this is an area where we cannot fail.
• Networking staff have been really busy. We had a brief outage arising from a change to network configuration that was done without appropriate consultation with ITS. We are figuring out ways to avoid this in the future.
• We have had complaints about network performance during the late night period (9 PM- 2 AM) in the residential network. Thanks to some creative work on the part of the networking staff, we have been able to address some of the solutions such as iTunes store connectivity. The network bandwidth is proving to be a limiting factor for the multimedia heavy use of the Internet and the staff are working really hard to find creative ways to resolve the problem in the most equitable way while preserving the bandwidth to support the core academic mission of the University.
• Wireless expansion continues and the implementation of AT&T Uverse for network access in the woodframe house is proceeding well.
• New Media Lab in collaboration with the University Communication has been working extremely hard to keep up with all the requests coming their way – redesign of the home page (which you will see in a few days), use of the blogs for the headline news on the home page, posting more content to YouTube, and iTunesU, finalizing the choice of a web content management system, prototyping applications for the iPhone. All of this, while continuing to do the other academic projects as well as maintaining the websites.
• We have also started collecting and paying more attention the Analytics. Who is coming to the website, how much time they are spending, which pages are never visited etc. to help us architect the next generation web to be more efficient.
• A group of TSS and Administrative Computing staff members have been spending a lot of time looking at Database use and have a plan to optimize the Electronic Portfolio login process to help reduce the database hits. This is a really welcome change because the Portfolio use has been increasing gradually and we are at a point where its usage and the impact on our databases are beginning to cause capacity concerns.
• Administrative Computing services in collaboration with Academic Affairs will be rolling out the online teacher evaluation University wide for the first time.
• The Personal Goal setting interface has been completely rewritten and is in production. As of Jan 1, there will be a new module available for Roth SRA deduction (the very first time the enrollment requires signature on paper, but all subsequent activities happen on the web)
• We have been working with University Relations to implement a web-based phonathon system for Red and Black callers to better reach our donors.  The software, called Dial Vision,  includes branched scripting and the ability to store call results.  It also provides detailed statistics, and standard reports for the call center manager.

As you can tell, Lots going on indeed… I want to Thank all of the ITS staff for the hard work and dedication that helps us accomplish a lot.

As I mentioned above, it is quite possible that I have left out some of the projects that are under way. Please feel free to add them.