tsimpson's blog

I have been blogging on wordpress lately. I keep it seperate from EDUCAUSE as topics sometimes go outside of the scope.

Check it out here: badgerworks: Technology, the Enterprise, and their Design

Last week, my colleagues Susan and Ben and I presented our recent findings in the area of portal technology as applied to the higher education enterprise at the perennially outstanding Portal Conference at Gettysburg College. Ben focused primarily on technical issues while Susan and I focused on strategy -- there was plenty of crossover between us, though. Our presentation is available below on slideshare.

The past month has been a hectic one across the MICA enterprise. Check out the following realeases we made over the past two weeks alone.

Academic Analytics
On February 5, 2008, we successfuly launched the first phase of our Academic Analytics project at MICA. All senior staff were given access to our analytics environment. This first release is an implementation of Higher Ed Analytics by iStrategy Solutions. We have already started 2 projects within this project that will challenge us to extend the delivered functionality.

I lunched at the EDUCAUSE Mid Atlantic Regional Conference yesterday and today with my colleague Cory Cone.

Here is Cory presenting his poster MICA Connected: Bringing People, Information and Services Together Through Innovative Technology. Cory is one of the young guns at MICA. A recent graduate, he took over many administrative and academic technology tasks and has been a key member of our staff since day one. We can't wait to hear back from Cory about all of the great sessions he attended this week.

Here's Cory evangelizing about MICA Connected to The Amazing Tamara Petronka, MEEC Executive Director. MEEC was a great ally for MICA as we worked to make MICA Connected a reality, so THANK YOU Tamara and MEEC!

Here it is: Campus Solutions 9.0 integrated into Enterprise Portal 9.0 integrated into our existing web presence. Notice the cool things like the enterprise navigation (left nav) getting served up into the flash nav across the top. Note the enterprise menu (portal) has deep linking into Campus Solutions. Thus, I go to mica.edu, click 'MyMICA' (one), login and click (two) and click 'Personal Information' (three) and I am deep into my own personal information in Campus Solutions 9.0. This is our first stab at integrated web presence -- it only gets better from here.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE                                                         
Contact: Ted Simpson
October 29, 2007            
410-225-2531
tsimpson@mica.edu

MICA RELEASES ORACLE PEOPLESOFT 9.0

Upgrades Include Campus Solutions, HRMS, and Enterprise Portal 9.0

Multi-Year Initiative Reflects MICA’s Commitment to Leadership and Innovation in Technology and Positions the College as a Leader in Higher Education Technology

Today we released Campus Solutions 9.0 and Enterprise Portal 9.0 at the Maryland Institute College of Art!

I spent the weekend with some really great people:

• Uday Bagampalli, Resident Genius and Consigliere
• Ben Liyanage, Web Magician and Starbucks Fanatic
• Susan Miltenberger, Jedi Master
• Tracy Posner, Technical Mastermind and Meal Reminder
• Rana Silver, Funktional Rockstar and Super Commuter

Ni Hao

Ted/MICA.

Enter Rana . . .

. . . to put the funk in functional.

. . . and when it gets really late, when no one is looking . . .

. . . the old folks come in for a swing shift.

Next step was verifying integration between Campus Solutions 9.0 and Enterprise Portal 9.0 . . .

. . . web magician Ben takes over.

28 hours and 16 minutes later . . .

. . . the upgrade was completed.

For the next 2 days we will be verifying data and putting on the finishing touches to prepare for our Monday morning release!

Late last night . . .

. . . in the war room at MICA.

I saw my friend Chris Couture at the HEUG/Alliance conference last March and snapped this photo of him:

I told him I'd put it on my blog and never did.  So, I am posting it today because we just swapped emails.  Chris is a really smart guy working for CIBER.

Hi Chris!!

Today is the last day of the Eduweb Conference.  This has been a rich and varied conference.  We have learned quite a bit, have been able to tell our story and hear others'.  Because we are really trying to develop a unified web presence at MICA, conferences like this one allow us to see all of those things we COULD (or not) be doing and sort out the ones we SHOULD be doing (or not).

You can see who is blogging about this conference here:

http://eduwebbuzz.com/blog/2007/07/23/edu-web-conference-blogging/

Also, I am the guest blogger for http://eduwebbuzz.com for the month of August -- so read it!

Susan and I are presenting at the Eduweb Conference in Baltimore today (http://www.eduwebconference.com/).  Our presentation is called "MICA Connected: Bringing People, Information and Services Together" and we are talking primarily about how we are trying to make our unified web presence experience as close to the experience of visiting MICA as we can.

I am blogging from the keynote speech right now -- so I will sign off, pay attention and get ready for our presentation (which starts in an hour).