Ravi Blogs about IT Topics

Cloud computing refers to the idea of computing happening out in the “cloud”, which refers to the internet. Increasing availability of faster network connections and most importantly, the affordability of the bandwidth would mean that for certain selected applications, having them run elsewhere on the cloud can be very attractive. Amazon popularized this concept because [...]

Last few days have been very exciting and stressful. I attribute most of this to my personality and the technology that enables us to be connected at all times. I cannot let a minute go by without checking whether I have a new email; whether a facebook buddy has updated the status; the status of [...]

I have been extremely busy with various things that I have not had time to write for a long time. As most of you know, I moved to a Mac, purchased an iPhone and have been playing around with some of the new features of Jott and I want to write about them all in [...]

Congress recently passed Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) which is expected to be signed into a law by the president soon. This act requires several regulatory and reporting requirements for institutions like us when the law goes into effect. The specific piece of the legislation that is relevant to us has to do with uploading [...]

The University Business Continuity Planning has been pretty active for the past three years or so under the leadership of Cliff Ashton from Physical Plant and has developed detailed plans for various emergency responses. We have had some emergency response exercises on campus in collaboration with the teams from both Middletown and I believe the [...]

We had a really fabulous and unforgettable time in France and got back late Sunday night, a lot poorer than when we left the US (thanks to the weak dollar and the fact that things in Europe are generally expensive in comparison). We spent about 5 days in Paris and the rest of the time [...]

Over the years that I have been here, I have participated in several E-mail transitions both in the front end as well as back end. I can assure you that given the complexity of E-mail systems, we have done extremely well and we have always done things that have been leading edge and very creative [...]

Both Jolee and I attended the 20th annual meeting  of Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges (CLAC) at Union College in Schenectady, NY. The campus is  beautiful and sprawling. The College was founded in 1795 and  I think they bought all the land they could and help on to it. CLAC is a very small group [...]

I have had discussions with a few of you recently about purchasing and negotiations. In the event you don’t know, I negotiate EVERY single major purchase that ITS makes. There are varied opinions on this strategy, primarily “Is this worth anyone’s time?” My answer is, if you do it right, it is worth every penny [...]

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 [...]