Educause has just released a video preview of some of the top ten IT issues for 2012, which is embedded below.
I serve on the Current Issues Committee that produces the list of top ten issues. This year, we completely changed the process for selecting the top ten issues, and this resulted in some interesting new perspectives. The full article is available on the Educause Review Site.
The semester progresses and we’re getting closer to the moment when we graduate a new class. So I’ll keep this update brief.
iPad 3 and Kinect
If you’re in need of distraction, we have a couple of the new iPads and a Kinect available for loan from the CIS help desk. You can borrow them to try out for a couple of weeks. Contact the Help Desk.
Google Privacy
Google introduced a new privacy policy for their suite of consumer products. The HMC contract for Google Apps for Education is not affected by this new policy, as it is a separate contract. There are more details at.http://www5.hmc.edu/ITNews/?p=1963
Sakai service changes
It is almost certain that Harvey Mudd College will no longer be the “lead Claremont College” for the Sakai service after this summer. This is as a result of long discussions about the options for sourcing the service, either with a specialized company or with another lead college. Again, there are lots more details in the article about Sakai service changes coming.
Email and Calendar progress
The Email and Calendar team has been busily migrating people off of mailbox-01.hmc.edu (Zimbra). We have migrated more than 40 faculty to Google Apps for Education and have begun migrating staff to Microsoft Office365 (CIS moved a couple of weeks ago; the President’s Office moved this week and OCA begins moving next week). It looks like we are on target to remove all the accounts by the deadline we have set, which will allow us to discontinue the licensing agreement for Zimbra.
As with all technology changes, there is a learning curve, both for us and you. We have a plethora of options at HMC, with a high emphasis on autonomy. So there are lots of different email clients and practices that people have, which inevitably means there is at least a little bit of learning for each new migration.
We’ve started collecting anecdotes about how people use Google Apps. For example, read about a couple of things that Eliot Bush does. If you have ideas to share, let us know. Also, Calvin wrote in detail about an issue we were seeing with mails forwarded to yourself in Google Apps for Education.
Survey on Student Use of Technology
I recently sent a message to students-l about participating in the Educause Center for Applied Research survey of student use of technology. It’s an annual survey that is widely cited and helps many institutions make technology support decisions. This is the first year that HMC had an opportunity to participate. As I wrote to the students, it’s time that the national survey included opinions from students at the institution that gave the world the MIME standard (Ned Freed ’82), SQL (Don Chamberlin ’66), Flash (Jonathan Gay ’89), Remote Procedure Calls (Bruce Jay Nelson ’74) and Audacity (Dominic Mazzoni ’99). If you agree, prompt a student near you to complete the survey! Thanks.
Next update will be late April/early May. Not very far away. Until then, may the end of the semester be a good one for you all.
Harvey Mudd College has been the “Lead College” for the Sakai service since its inception in 2006. This means that we provide the service to all the Claremont Colleges and receive some funding from the other Colleges to do so.
About two years ago I began to explore the option of contracting with rSmart for Sakai hosting. rSmart is a company dedicated to hosting Sakai and other Higher Ed applications for a long list of higher education customers. Hosting the service with them would take advantage of their expertise and the scale of their operation, which is based in Arizona and housed in one of the largest data centers in the country. On almost all dimensions of the comparison — cost, architecture, functionality, infrastructure, expertise — rSmart looked to be an improvement over what HMC could provide alone. Exploration of this option took many months, and then in August 2011 I made a formal proposal to the Information Technology Committee (ITC) that we should host Sakai with rSmart. A series of monthly discussions took place, including a visit by the rSmart team in December. However, I did not manage to persuade my CIO colleagues from the other Claremont Colleges and so the ITC voted to accept an offer from Pomona College to host the service. The ITC is now moving forward to bring that recommendation to two other Intercollegiate committees, the Business and Financial Affairs Committee (BFAC) and the Academic Deans Commitee (ADC). Assuming those committees endorse the idea, the Sakai service will be provided by Pomona College effective July 1, 2012.
If the service does move to Pomona, end users will not see any real difference in how the service is delivered. Pomona has offered to continue to subsidize the service and to augment and strengthen the infrastructure, which are good things. Over time, they may install the rSmart version of Sakai which would provide some nice additional functionality over the “vanilla” version of Sakai that we have been running.
User support for Sakai questions will continue in the same way as it does now. You can contact the Help Desk for help with issues and if you need advice on how to use a particular tool, you could contact Elizabeth Hodas.
For CIS, the change means a return of time and resources that were being dedicated to supporting the intercollegiate service. During the analysis of the rSmart option, I discovered that we were subsidizing the service by about $50k per year. We were indeed investing time and resources in an important service and received praise from the other Colleges for our work. But we are now looking forward to investing time and energy in other projects that will benefit the College, while confident that the Sakai service will be delivered in the ways we were familiar with.
On March 1, 2012 Google introduced a new privacy policy that applies to their consumer products (gmail, picasa, youtube etc). There was a huge amount of coverage of this in the media.
Discussion with the HMC Computing Committee made it clear that we should remind you that the HMC contract with Google is for the Google Apps for Education (GAE) service, which is a separate suite of products, covered by a separate contract. The new privacy policy does not apply to the core GAE service.
Among the key differences between GAE and the consumer service is that GAE includes a FERPA clause. This clause stipulates that Google is subject to FERPA in the same way as the college is, and must process educational records (such as emails to students) accordingly.
In our discussions within CIS, we were struck by the fact that what Google is doing seems so much part and parcel of the tracking we are all subject to, both on and off line. Retailers have been doing it for decades, as we learned from a NY Times article about how companies learn your secrets. I find it fascinating which practices and policy changes get noticed, and which don’t.
So, again, the GAE contract is separate from the Google’s consumer product privacy policy. If you have concerns or want to learn more, you should read the Google Apps for Education contract.
You may also find these Chronicle, Educause and Campus Technologies posts of interest.
This is the February 2012 update from the CIO, with news about a number of projects.
Ultipro
CUC switched over to Ultipro for payroll and benefits in late December, in time for the new tax year. Ultipro is Software as a Service (SaaS), delivered over the internet. Since it is used for processing payroll and benefits it will no doubt become familiar to all HMC employees. It includes a number of self-service options that allow you to change things like the address and phone number that HR has on record for you. We are delighted to say that Ultipro is the first application to be included in our Identity and Access Management (IAM) initiative. The immediate effect is that you will not get a new username and password for Ultipro but instead you will use your HMC Credentials to access the site. Later phases of the IAM initiative will include self service password management for your HMC Credentials and inclusion of other applications, so that once you’ve logged on to one application, you won’t be challenged for a username and password when you open the next application. Eventually, Ultipro will serve as the “authoritative source” for employee information, and we will use the information it contains to trigger automated creation and deletion of accounts on many systems.
EMSCampus
F&M’s Isabel Jordan played the role of guest author and wrote for us about the upgrade of EMS to EMS Campus. EMS Campus is shared between all of the Colleges, and operated by Pomona College. The registrars were particularly interested in this upgrade as it will provide an online process to build the class schedule each semester.
CIS service vision
I wrote earlier about our BAO and CIS service initiative, which ended in early January. We owe the members of the Business Office Leadership Team (BOLT) a debt of gratitude for their help with this initiative. We are currently digesting what we learned from the experiment but know already that we would like to extend several elements into the future and across the college. The first is a new commitment on our part to make more use of the Footprints ticket system. Read more about this in the article CIS to make more use of Footprints ticket system.
ProfSOS
Kerry Karukstis recently announced the launch of ProfSOS (“student offered support”) which offers faculty assistance from students on specific tasks. CIS built the ProfSOS application by linking together a number of cloud and local services. Calvin Tong has written a nice article explaining this in more detail. We were able to get ProfSOS up and running in a matter of hours, whereas we would have had to tell Prof Karukstis to wait for quite some time if we were going to use our internal staff and server resources to accomplish the same task. This is one of the key benefits of the cloud computing offerings that we are taking advantage of.
UCS and virtualization
Speaking of internal staff and resources, our systems and network group has been busy since the arrival of our Unified Computing System (UCS). A UCS is basically an integrated set of servers contained in one cabinet. We are using ours to host a VMware virtualization environment. The systems and network staff set the environment up during the break and are busy converting physical servers into virtual servers. There are now eighteen production systems housed on the UCS.
Educational Technology News
Elizabeth Hodas wrote about the Spring Bite of Learning series, which has gotten off to a terrific start; lots of people attend and the discussions are lively. Among the topics coming up this semester are presentations on collaboration with Google Apps, on classroom walls that talk and on bringing research alive with social media.
Elizabeth also wrote about a Kaltura video pilot that we are running this semester.
Network and infrastructure work
At the January Board of Trustees meeting, we provided an update on our network and infrastructure work. (In the Fall, I uploaded the September PPCPC presentation). We have completed inventory of our network equipment, which is housed in 23 locations across campus. We will now engage a vendor to validate our inventory and help with design of a new network. We are obtaining pricing for replacement of switches and routers (71 of them across campus) and anticipate working with BAO to develop an financial plan that will allow continuous investment in the network infrastructure. We have identified a couple of possible locations to which we can move equipment out of our data center (in particular, we’d like to move the UCS I mentioned above) and are evaluating connectivity and costs associated with those locations. Under the auspices of CINE we are also evaluating options to increase the diversity of our internet connections with Los Nettos, our Internet Services Provider (ISP).
Email and Calendar
The email and calendar team are making steady progress on email migration from Zimbra to Google Apps. They are currently scheduling migrations one department at a time, although they are also doing individual migrations on request. We are finding that demand is slightly outpacing our ability to get the accounts created and the email and calendar information transferred. Given the prevalence of Outlook as an email and calendar client in many of the administrative departments, we have decided to offer them two accounts, one in Office 365 for email and calendaring and one in Google Apps for collaborative document editing. Internally in CIS we have moved much of our document creation and editing to Google Apps and we don’t miss the days of passing different versions of Word and Excel documents around! Read more in Cindy Abercrombie’s article Email and Calendar Project Update.
That’s quite a list of work for the first two months of the year. Enjoy your Spring semester!
Partly as a result of our recent BAO and CIS service initiative CIS has committed to making more effective use of the issue tracking system Numara Footprints. This system is housed at Pomona College and is used by most of the Claremont Colleges, though each has a separate section in the database.
CIS has developed a process for working with the ticket system which identifies roles, responsibilities and the stages in the ticket life cycle. There’s a quick overview in the following slideshow.
Essentially, there are three roles and three life cycle stages. The roles are “user” (you, the customer!), ”assignee” (members of CIS staff that do the work), and “owner” (member of CIS staff responsible for guiding the ticket through to completion). The “owner” plays a customer advocate role to ensure that we provide the service we aspire to provide.
Why would you care about any of this? If we put issues in a ticket system they are less likely to be forgotten, and are seen by more than one pair of eyes. We will be able to track the work we do at CIS better, and build a knowledge base of solutions to common problems. You don’t have to know the details of who does what in order to see your requests answered. And we’ll be able to ask you for specific feedback about individual service requests.
This is the last update from the CIO for the Fall 2011 Semester.
Identity and Access Management (IAM).
We have begun work with Fischer International on our Identity and Access Management initiative. Within the next twelve months, you’ll see self-service password management and a single sign on environment begin to emerge. Read more in the article IAM @ HMC journey begins.
Bite of Learning.
The Fall Bite of Learning series ended December 8, with a packed house for Greg Lyzenga’s chat about paperless note taking using the Livescribe Pen and other technologies. We recorded all of the sessions this semester, and will be getting them posted on the web over the break. Elizabeth Hodas has been putting together the schedule for the Spring, so if you have a topic you’d like to discuss or a presenter you’d like to nominate (Skype works for off campus presenters!), then please get in touch with her.
Presentations on Educational Technology and Infrastructure.
At the annual Saddle Rock retreat for Trustees, I gave a presentation on Technology and Education. Actually, it was more like a mini-presentation, designed to stimulate discussion among the retreat attendees. You can see a reconstruction of the presentation in the article Saddle Rock Presentation on Technology and Education. Earlier in the semester, Cindy Abercrombie, Mitch Shacklett and I discussed the College’s network infrastructure with one of the Trustee committees, the Physical Plant and Campus Planning Committee or PPCPC (say that acronym really quickly three times if you can!). That presentation reviewed the questions we are asking about the infrastructure and revealed some of our early findings. The overall goal of this work is to come up with a long term plan to improve and maintain the network. You can see a reconstruction at PPCPC Presentation on Infrastructure.
Email and Calendar.
The email and calendar team turned off mailbox-02, the system that was formerly dedicated to in-house student email. All the students and some faculty are now on Google Apps for Education. After much to and fro about licensing, we recently received information from Microsoft about how to set up Office365 accounts. Watch for updates on this during the Spring Semester — our goal is to be able to turn off mailbox-01 before the end of the fiscal year.
Joint work with BAO.
The CIS management team (Cindy Abercrombie, Elizabeth Hodas, Susan Selhorst, Mitch Shacklett, Calvin Tong, Joseph Vaughan) conducted a very fruitful day long retreat with the management team of the Business Affairs Office (Andrew Dorantes, David Dower, Cynthia Beckwith, Theresa Lauer, Miguel Ruvalcaba, Justin Low, Scott Martin). We discovered many characteristics that our units have in common and worked on some of the challenges we face together as well as those we face at the intersection of our services. You can read more in the article BAO and CIS Service Initiative.
CIS Highlights of the year.
In our last staff meeting of the year, CIS took time to reflect on the achievements of the past twelve months. We had fun doing this, and it is always good to review your accomplishments. You can read about them in the article Highlights of 2011
On behalf of all at CIS, I wish you all the best for the holidays and a restful break. Come back energized and ready for 2012!
As we did last year, at the last CIS staff meeting for the year we put our heads together and listed the things that stood out for us as significant accomplishments during the past twelve months.
Here’s the list we came up with:
In my last update from the CIO I gave a quick overview of Identity and Access Management (IAM). We have now contracted with Fischer International for Identity and Access Management services. Throughout 2012, this decision will have an increasing impact on all of our daily computing lives. You will hear and read more and more references to your “HMC Credentials”, which will be a username and password derived from your current Charlie or Alice passwords (Active Directory). We will stop referring to credentials that are specific to an application, such as “your Zimbra username and password”. Eventually, your HMC Credentials will be the only credentials you need to access most services; moreover, you will see a “single sign on” ecology begin to emerge: once you’ve logged in to one service, you typically will not have to provide credentials for the next service you visit. For example, you would log on to your computer in the morning and then visit Sakai, which would recognize that you have already authenticated and not ask you for your credentials a second time. Ditto when you visit email (including Google Apps) after you’ve logged into Sakai or the Portal. And so on.
The IAM @ HMC initiative will also bring you a web interface to reset your password for your HMC credentials.
At the September Board of Trustee meetings, Cindy Abercrombie, Mitch Shacklett and I presented some information about our work in the area of network infrastructure review. We are working toward a long term plan for the network infrastructure and wanted the Physical Plant and Campus Planning Committee (PPCPC) to be aware of the issues we are seeking to address.
Below is a reconstruction of the presentation, which I recorded afterward. If you want to look at the full size screen cast, you will find it here.