IRT: news, plans and projects for this year

On behalf on my colleagues in IRT, I would like to add our "welcome back" for the fall semester. The summer was busy with our annual computer replacements, and wireless, network and server upgrades. As we start the new year, I'd like to provide an update of IRT news, plans and projects for this year.

UTAC IRT Plan
The University Technology Committee (UTAC) completed work on recommendations and goals for the IRT Plan last spring. Over the summer, we've been busy compiling a final draft of the plan for review by the UTAC this fall. Following that review, we will share the plan for comment with the whole community. We look forward to your comments. I'd like especially to thank the members of the UTAC who worked for nearly two years to draw from many sources of information the components of the plan.

Faculty Center for e-Learning
IRT is pleased to announce the opening this fall of the Faculty Center for e-Learning, as noted in Rosann Cahill's article in the fall edition of Synergia.

The center will be supported by IRT's Web and Media Services, University Libraries and Client Services. The physical space is located in Room 102, O'Shaughnessy-Frey Library Center. It is fitted with new, modular furniture and technology to accommodate many discussion, presentation and teleconferencing needs. The room will be used for a variety of activities, including workshops, guest speakers, faculty presentations – and simply conversation. The center was furnished with support from General Office Products and Steelcase. Special thanks go to Laura Deuberry for her leadership in designing and planning the furnishings and working with the vendors.

The Faculty Center for e-Learning's inaugural event will feature cultural anthropologist Dr. Michael Wesch from Kansas State University. Wesch has been exploring digital ethnography in research and teaching, and was thrust into "fame" when his short video, “Web 2.0…The Machine is us/ing Us” became a YouTube sensation while being viewed over 3 million times. This event will be held at UST on the afternoon of Friday, Oct. 19. The presentation is titled “Human Futures for Technology and Education.” We will be communicating much more through the fall about this and other events.

Digital Convergence Initiative
Since 2005, we have worked to propose a major network upgrade to take UST into the next decade. We have done so to address the rapid increases we have experienced in Internet traffic as well as the network traffic increases on campus for teaching, learning, scholarly activity, campus life and the university's business. We must also prepare for the convergence of media of all types – voice, data and video – onto a converged network based on Internet Protocol (IP).

The "network" of today is really three separate networks, each with its own infrastructure that must be maintained. The technology to combine these three into one network is now feasible, and converged IP networks are rapidly becoming a standard. Without that infrastructure, we will be unable to maintain currency with new applications. Beyond that, convergence will allow us to leverage the advantages of converged forms such as unified messaging, digital repositories, an enterprise portal and intranet, and many other features. Some of that work is already underway, and we look forward to reporting its progress in the coming months.

Environmental stewardship
The importance of environmental stewardship at UST is increasingly apparent in many proposals across a broad set of topics. Environmental stewardship is important to IRT as well. In partnership with the UGS (then ACC) several years ago, we launched a program at students' suggestions to reduce paper waste in public lab printing across campus. The print management initiative resulted in a reduction of 50 percent in paper consumption.

Among IRT's goals for this year and thereafter is to continue to expand the importance of environmental stewardship. I am pleased note that Dell and Sun Microsystems, UST's two major vendors for computing equipment, have achieved high rankings as “green” companies.

Dell (along with Nokia) was rated best on the list of electronics companies studied by Greenpeace in its Guide to Greener Electronics, and Sun's Eco-responsibility initiative and award-winning new data center confirm its position as a leader in the field.

We will continue our initiatives to save energy through management of network and desktop computing, and applying environmental criteria to our acquisitions now and in the coming years. We also will be examining, through Sun's experience, how we might bring clear environmental standards to bear on planning for a new UST data center in the coming years.

Network and Telecom Services
UST's network overall uptime average was at 99.999 for for FY07. “Five nines” is the goal for UST network performance and an industry high-end standard. Commodity Internet connectivity expanded from 45 Mbps to 90 Mbps and will be expanded early in the fall semester to 150 Mbps. Wireless coverage for the campus was completed over the summer, with over 800 wireless access points serving the campuses.

Web and Media Services
Web and Media Services will continue work this year on the WebSPACE initiatives. With broad support across our community, Web and Media services, partnering with University Relations, completed a major redesign over UST's Web, which included the UST home page and more than 350 Web sites to date. Work to complete remaining Web sites will continue this year.

UST's new home page was selected as "Noteworthy" by eduStyle.net. The criteria for that selection are described by Steward Foss in a note of congratulations, that reads: "This month there were 7 sites in the running and you should be proud to know that your site was the overwhelming favorite and has been selected as "Noteworthy" for the month of September."

From July 1, 2006, to June 30, 2007, UST had 33,359,278 page views to tagged pages under www.stthomas.edu. Of those visits, 21,153,890 were from outside of the 140.209.x IP range (external visitors). This gives UST an average of 651,548 weekly and 91,665 daily page views total, with 413,162 weekly and 58,761 daily from outside UST.

WMS has moved approximately 60 to 70 percent of UST Web content (300,000 to 400,000 pages total according to our Google Appliance) into UST's Collage content management system. WMS now supports more than 500 application users, with that number increasing daily.

Athletics has launched a new fan site that will soon be the largest site deployed to date with over 8,000 assets and functionality that will be leveraged in the Bulletin Today to populate the latest news and content related to Tommie Sports.

UST has been awarded an Enterprise Portal grant from CampusEAI Consortium for FY07-09. Web and Media Services' development of UST's Enterprise Portal is a critical component of the Digital Convergence Initiative. The value of the grant is placed at $500,000.

Video Studio and video network upgrades
With the university's support and the outstanding work of the Media Services team, UST's Video Studio has received a complete digital makeover. The Video Studio supports instructional programs and production for other UST media needs. The Media Services team will host an open house in October.

UST's Budgets, Assets and Inventories team has begun a two-year digital conversion of UST's video distribution system. The new system will incorporate multiple digital sources and be able to tie the existing analog signals into the digital ones during conversion. The system will stream video between our Minneapolis and St. Paul campuses in real time and high quality, and stream video signals over IP across campus to possible event spaces or for two-way conferences, and out for external distribution.

University Libraries
The UST Libraries continue to develop goals that intentionally and thoughtfully advance the evolution of the academic library in the 21st century. We know that the libraries' Web presence, providing access to both content and services, is the main library for many of our users. The libraries, as part of our local consortium, are actively involved in investigating the alternative futures for one of our central technologies, the online library catalog.

We specifically intend to integrate training in the principles of information literacy into the curriculum in all of our interactions with students – individually as well as in our many classroom interactions, and formally and informally. It is essential that the libraries contribute to the development of graduates who go into the workplace as savvy users of information in a technology-rich world.

Beyond our instructional goals, we also understand that the libraries have the opportunity (and responsibility) to help build community at UST. This is an exciting role for the libraries – and one which is quickly evolving. Library staff will be writing more in the coming months about our efforts to develop these kinds of spaces in the libraries.

Finally, while the printed book and journal are fast becoming artifacts of another time, library staff find themselves managing a wide range of electronic content – in the form of large collections of e-journals, e-books and databases – as well as engaged in the development and management of locally produced digital content. We are participating in a number of digital asset initiatives – on campus, within our library consortium and statewide as part of the Minnesota Digital Library. Library staff will be publicizing more about our efforts in this area in the coming months as well.

Client Services
Client Services replaced approximately 1,200 computers, laptops, printers, and projectors as part of our summer rollout. The replacement process was streamlined this year through the creation of scripts that greatly reduced the amount of time it took to install the new systems. We also implemented a new ticketing tool at the Tech Desk that improves the way that our Tech Desk student workers take information over the phone and escalate incidents to IRT staff.

We have followed Microsoft Vista since its rollout and will continue testing Vista and Office 2007 to determine a plan for rollout and training for faculty and staff. Many students came to UST with Vista and 2007 computers this year, and we were prepared. We pushed the Office Converter Pack to all UST computers this summer so that faculty and staff can read and edit documents created with Office 2007 and students can move between the labs and their own computers with ease.

Look for articles about storage at UST as well as Vista and Office 2007 in upcoming Bulletin Today issues.

Information Technology (IT)
Over the summer the IT department implemented registration for freshmen orientation, placement testing, and the ability to sign up for health insurance all through Murphy Online. IT also implemented a new budgeting and planning software system, a new tool for event tracking, upgraded Blackboard, and replaced 25 percent of the servers used to support UST systems to provide the community with the fastest, most stable server environment possible.

During this academic year IT will be publicizing the new Net ID system (Sun Microsystems Identity Management tool – look for an article in October) and creating the business case for implementing a customer relationship management (CRM) system at the university.

Information Security Team
Spring 2007 saw the creation of a new team within IRT to address the growing concerns of information security. In November 2006, Chris Gregg was selected to serve in the role of director of information security. Erik Nelson from NTS and Tony DelVecchio from IT formed the newly created information security team.

The information security team is responsible for a combination of network and system security issues, including the policies, procedures and technologies to be used for security management. These systems include the network firewalls, wireless network registration system, enterprise monitoring systems, and IP addressing. The team also is the point of contact for IRT on all investigations and complaints regarding security or compliance issues.