Last week was a fantastic week weather-wise, not so fantastic a week for the Red Sox (who are doing well in Minnesota so far), but then we are back to “seasonal weather” again. Today is a big day at Wellesley where there are over 150 presentations by students in the Ruhlman Conference. I am very happy to say that we designed the application that the students and their advisors used during the submission and approval process – one of our PHP app connected via the My Wellesley portal. In the true spirit of collaboration, we shared the collected information with the CS department, who have developed an excellent online tool called RAPP, by which you can browse the program and create your own schedule. I plan to attend a few talks in the afternoon. I would love to attend a few in the morning on protein modeling to relive my years as a researcher in molecular modeling, but I have other commitments in the morning 🙁

The annual performance cycle is upon us and this provides us a great opportunity for reflections on how much we accomplished during the past year. It is a LOT and LTS staff should be proud of all of our collective accomplishments. It is also a time that we plan ahead for the upcoming year. As I have mentioned in the past, I was a skeptic of this whole process for a while mainly because we were all beginning to do this for the first time and didn’t do it right. I now am a believer because we have tools and mechanisms to help us manage these tasks better. Most criticisms come from the fact that goals go by the wayside because unexpected things happen during the year that takes away time from us to be able to achieve the goals. Whereas there is some truth to this, I believe this can be handled through constant communication, setting achievable and realistic goals (taking into consideration the time it takes to put out fires) and time management. If you are still a skeptic, talk to me!

In a few weeks I will write about our organizational goals, so this is a teaser on what is to come. Our plan will be around “Stability”. We have made huge changes in many different areas that LTS supports during the past year – Sakai, Google Apps, Kaltura, Digital Commons, SuperSearch & Drupal to name the major ones. We have also helped streamline a whole slew of business processes through web applications using PHP and java tied to the portal. For eg. Faculty Awards, Tanner & Ruhlman conference applications and reviews, Science Center Summer Research Application and review, Student Life Student Leader Application, Pinanski Award nomination and SCAS, a scheduling and classroom preference application for Registrar. We have tried very hard to make these applications look and feel the same from familiarity perspective, still, it is a change in the way our students, faculty and staff have conducted business.

In the upcoming year, we want to make these environments stronger and stable and build on them. This does not necessarily mean that the user community will not see changes, which are quite natural in the business we are in. For eg. we have been asked to look at 25Live scheduling software from the perspective of ease of use, relative to other options, the printer/scanner contract for the College will be coming up for renewal, so we will collaborate with the Administration and Planning department to evaluate the next generation of printers and scanners with an eye towards the Nolij document management system, whose use will increase significantly in the coming months amongst many administrative departments.

We plan to look at several of the infrastructure areas during the 2012-2013 academic year for improvement. For eg. we currently sort of use Oracle Identity Management software for managing account creation, but in my humble opinion, it is a monster and a misfit for what we need. We need a system that we understand, suitable for our needs and allows us to extend without having to depend on others! We have constituted a core group of technologists to discuss the needs and build the system ourselves. This also ties into upgrading and revamping our Active Directory so that the structures of AD can be exploited in more powerful ways.

The other area where we will be doing some research is the portal. We plan to look at the next version of Luminis, but also LifeRay, an open source portal. We have developed confidence in being able to adopt open source software through Drupal, where our staff have done a wonderful job of understanding and modifying the system to suit our needs. LifeRay provides that opportunity, but first we need to understand how mature it is as an open source product, the community that is using it, how best it suits our needs etc.

We plan to engage in more digitization projects in special collections and archives area during the next year building on the enormous success of the Browning Love Letter project. We have also formed a committee to advise us on policies for collections in the Archives, which got off to a great start. We will continue to be engaged in Wellesley 2025 conversations and how the spaces and programming in the Libraries are going to change as a result of these.

Cloud strategy will be yet another infrastructure that we will be discussing and developing strategies in the upcoming year. We have a proposal to move our data center to a nearby facility thereby taking advantage of the disaster recovery options this provides while having an active data center placed in an environment where conditioned power and most importantly cooling are non-issues. Similarly, the cost of purchasing disk for storage is no longer defensible and is not scalable. With the anticipated increase in digitization of library materials as well as increasing need for academic research storage, cloud storage is going to become a key factor in how we offer this service. With Google Apps, Sakai, and Digital Commons, we are already doing a lot of cloud storage! In each of these cases, the changes will be made in a way it is transparent to the end users. Just the way they mount NTM or Vault, they will mount a Google Drive or an Amazon S3 storage. Of course, this type of storage is not suitable for everything we do, so we still will need local storage, but the amount and the growth will be very limited.

I have asked our computing and media staff to spend the summer to do a serious financial analysis of the cost of hiring external vendors to manage all programming for classroom A/V and see if there are alternate models to drive down the cost and increase flexibility, for eg. hiring a programmer. By the way, we now have an iPad controlling all classroom A/V in one of our classrooms for testing. I am pretty sure that some faculty members would love the flexibility that this provides. As a device, an iPad is more attractive in that in addition to controlling devices, it can do million other things. The fixed Crestron devices, while expensive, can only do that one thing! It is this type of creative ideas that we will be engaging in. I have also asked RIS to look into offering a workshop in iBooks Author tool to help author books.

As you can see, I have already outlined a bunch of stuff that will form the plan for the upcoming year. While many are large and important projects that will consume a lot of time and effort, they are bring stability to our infrastructure, a different kind of stability than the stability of toolset we have rolled out for our users.

Finally, we are in the last stages of drafting plans for the consolidation of LTS staff in Clapp which will begin soon and expected to end by early Fall. While highly disruptive, I am pretty confident that after its completion we wil lall benefit from this. This is yet another major initiative for us in the upcoming year.