Last Tuesday (2/15/2011)  was yet another meeting-filled day and once again I took a resolution to block my meeting maker so I have at least one hour to catch up on things every day. It doesn’t appear that I will be able to accomplish this at least for a week or two. I was floating in and out of presentation by iStrategy, a Datawarehouse solution that uses modern dimensional data modeling techniques for reporting. I also attended a meeting with the faculty in the sciences around High Performance Computing (HPC) needs. Both were a lot of fun… Talking about HPC, I stopped writing for a few minutes to watch Watson compete in Jeopardy!

I was given an opportunity to talk at the Administrative Council at the College on Monday, Feb 14. I was happy to see a good attendance. Some of the attendees had already heard what I had to say more than once, so apologies to those for the repetition… I am going to touch on many of the important things that I talked about there, but if I miss anythign important, please email me and I will be happy to respond.

I began my presentation by showing off the Wellesley-branded iPad case (I have the black one), which Public Affairs helped us design. Anyone who is interested in purchasing one should contact Chris Card in IS.

Then I talked about the list of items that IS staff collectively developed for Jan 31 completion. I know that many are tired of hearing how the original list of 12 became 20 plus and how all of them were achieved. However, this is extremely important first step for us and I am extremely proud that the IS staff took this to their heart and got it done. Here are a few items (some discussed and some probably not):

• Mobile Apps that were rolled out to Students first and then to the Faculty & Staff.
• Classroom technology – We now have a very proactive program to make sure all the technologies work well in the classroom. Also, any bookmarks or software that the faculty have installed or requested us to install will remain on the classroom computers for an entire semester. Logins on these computers should now be faster than before.
• Web Help Desk which allows the users to directly create tickets on the web as well as track the status. I also mentioned how some of the administrative departments may find this useful for supporting service requests. Anyone interested should contact Doug Chudzik, the Helpdesk Manager.
• Expansion of Internet Connectivity.  We have a 1 Gb connectivity to the Internet as compared to 160 Mb. This should provide everyone a much better experience connecting to the Internet and becomes important with Sakai being hosted outside the College network and the likelihood of moving to a hosted Email/Calendaring solution.
• We have established a blog for the Advisory Committee on Library and Technology Policy Committee – http://blogs.wellesley.edu/acltp where discussions are proceeding about the choice of a new system. Access to this is restricted to College network.
• On the telephony side, we now have called id support for outgoing calls, which can be disabled by dialing *67 before the call one makes.
• Talked about requesting the feature for emailing voicemails as wav files. I use this and another feature to forward my calls to my cell phone, because I am rarely in my office. Please contact Lisa Diethelm if you are interested in the emailing of VMs. We are in the process of developing policies for the forwarding piece.
• 15 iPads are available for circulation in the library. We are likely to increase this based on the popularity. They are fantastic devices for eBook reading, taking meeting notes, email/calendaring etc. and also for playing games like the Angry Birds!
• We are also researching an Institutional Repository software that will help us digitize, store and make available electronically many collections in special collections & archives (provided they can be digitized and we have copyright clearance for distribution). You can read about this here.
• We worked with the Special Events team and Public Affairs on reworking the Events Calendar as well as presenting it on Mobile devices. This effort will continue with the migration to the web based version of R25 called 25Live.
• We installed wireless access points in the College Club before the Board meeting in Jan, which was welcomed by the Board members. In collaboration with the President’s office staff, we experimented with the distribution of documents on iPads, which also received favorable feedback.
• We extended the Helpdesk hours 8:15 AM – 5:30 PM during the semester.
• We have a blog for IS Service Alerts. We plan to use this going forward. All service alerts will be posted here and will be seen in the portal login page, IS home page and soon on Sakai login page. For those who would like to receive notification of these, you can also subscribe to receive emails.

I think I covered most of them 🙂 Here are a few that are in the works:

• VPN (Virtual Private Network). We are in the process of testing this and create documentation. When we roll this out, any faculty or staff member will be able to use it to connect to the College network securely from home and get access to many services that are currently not accessible from home. A little further down, some users who need access to more secure system will be able to access them, but they have to go through training to understand their responsibilities in protecting data.
• Large Filestorage – For faculty who are in need of additional file storage than what we are able to provide through NTM will be able to purchase additional storage for use in their research for a very reasonable fee.
• Special Events Media Coverage – We are strengthening our special events audiovisual support program in collaboration with the Special Events office. Please contact Meredith Germano for further details.
• IS staff will begin a project to evaluate various e-book readers soon thanks to the “Innovations in Reading and Scholarship” fund from the Friends of the Library. Please contact Steve Smith to learn more.
• Virtual Desktop pilot. This will provide an environment through which an entire windows computer can be requested on a server where all the program run and you will see the results in a window. This is very useful for running windows program from a Mac (without local installation of Parallels or VMWare Fusion), running licensed academic software right from your own machine etc. Details will follow.
• Talked about the need to manage project requests. We currently have over 140 requests that we need to prioritize and work to complete. We are creating a project request form in the Web Help Desk, so that all these requests are centralized and with the Technology Support Group, consisting of technical staff from various administrative offices, we will help prioritize them. My staff keep reminding me that I need to pass my project requests through this system also… Hmmm…

As you can see we have been busy… I want to thank all the IS staff for rising to the challenge and delivering!

Finally, we have reorganized. We are in the middle of updating all the role docs and expect to announce the new structure by mid-March. But, we have begun the transition internally.

And IS will transition to LTS (Library & Technology Services) when we announce our reorg.