EDUCAUSE | Information Systems and Services

Podcast: An Interview with Albert DeSimone, University of Georgia - Assessing the Effectiveness of a Portal Solution

gbayne — Thu, 12 Jul 2007 12:32:45 -0500

In this podcast, we feature an eleven minute interview with Albert DeSimone, Commuications Director for the University of Georgia. As a Communications Officer at the University of Georgia specializing in Information Technology, Mr. DeSimone assists students, faculty, and staff with Web-related projects. He was interviewed at the EDUCAUSE 2007 Southeast Regional Conference regarding his presentation entitled, "Assessing "Portalness: A Guide for CIOs and Other Decision Makers".

The abstract:

Assessing the effectiveness of a portal solution requires more than statistical analysis. In this presentation we will go beyond simple quantitative analysis (number of "hits" or visits) to assess the effectiveness of a portal based on qualitative attributes (integration, personalization, and customization) to assist in the evaluation of a current or future portal implementation.

Podcast: Information Technology at the Georgia Aquarium: A Trendsetter’s Perspective

gbayne — Mon, 02 Jul 2007 11:43:52 -0500

In this 56 minute podcast, we feature the opening keynote address from the EDUCAUSE 2007 Southeast Regional Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. It is a speech by Beach Clark, Vice President of Information Technology at the Georgia Aquarium entitled "Information Technology at the Georgia Aquarium: A Trendsetter's Perspective".

This session will portray the challenges of implementing information technology projects at the Georgia Aquarium, the world's largest aquarium. It will focus on lessons learned, system features that bolster business, and suggested areas of improvement both internally and with technology.

Managing IT: A Thousand Mile Front

tsimpson — Fri, 15 Jun 2007 18:20:55 -0500

I should have knocked on wood yesterday. Toward the end of the day I sighed and thought about what we had accomplished this year in MICA's technology department. This was a big mistake.

The penalty for this arrived first thing this morning with a 108 degree server room.

We are fighting the fight along a thousand mile front, seemingly. We have spent much of the last year getting support for a set of upgrades and a shift in how we approach technology at MICA (see MICA Connected). We have also developed the best staff we have ever had -- I mean a really, really great staff. We have worked hard to develop internal decision making and communication processes. We have collaborated with peer institutions. We have worked creatively with vendors. It seemed like there was nothing that could stand in our way.

to be continued . . .

2007 Enterprise Conference: The Changing Role of Enterprise Systems: From EDI to Internet Icons

gbayne — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 13:43:41 -0500

The opening keynote address from the 2007 EDUCAUSE Enterprise Conference in Chicago, Illinois. This speech was given by Kenneth C. Green, Founding Director of the Campus Computing Project, the largest continuing study of the role of information technology in American colleges and universities. This speech, entitled The Changing Role of Enterprise Systems: From EDI to Internet Icons, is approximately an hour and three minutes long.

Over the past 15 years campus administrative information systems have morphed into enterprise systems. This presentation will focus on the promises (implied and inferred) in this transformation from EDI in the 1990s ("systems will share data"), to the Internet-spawned expectations for online resources and services, to the recent Spellings Commission report mandate that campuses "bring data" from their enterprise systems to address critical assessment and outcome issues.

Beacon Technologies Provides IT Support to Multiple Universities Nationwide

bwalker — Thu, 22 Mar 2007 10:06:59 -0500

Beacon Technologies has a history of working with Universities to provide IT services including website design and development, programmatic solutions, content management systems, ecommerce solutions, and other services. Beacon began their work in the education sector with providing the University of North Carolina at Greensboro's Genomics department in combination with Duke University with a website that captured the departments need for a highly technical, yet clean and functional look and feel.   The designers at Beacon Technologies are able to transform a vision into web graphics that convey the sophistication that today's graphic design demands.

Since their humble beginnings with the UNCG Genomix department, Beacon Technologies has gone on to work with Wake Forest's MBA school site providing search engine optimization to designing and developing the entire website for Texas Southern University.

Many schools are now moving to provide ecommerce solutions to sell their school's products directly on their websites. Beacon has been able to capitalize on this by providing turn-key ecommerce solutions. A good example of this is NC State's Engineering department's ecommerce store in which they now sell school products and resources nationwide.

If you are shopping for a great company to help provide IT support that has the experience in the education sector, Beacon Technologies has proven they have what it takes to succeed.   The day when you could find a student that knows HTML to provide all of you IT support are gone. Designing, developing, or supporting a national level school takes more than what a group of students can supply.

EDUCAUSE2006 Podcast: Server Consolidation

Carie417 — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 19:32:23 -0600

In this 35-minute recording from the 2006 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, we'll hear from Tim Antonowicz in a session entitled Server Consolidation: A Case Study in Success. He shares how Bowdoin College has saved nearly $300,000 in hardware costs using HP Blades and VMWare.

EDUCAUSE2006 Podcast: Getting the Most Out of Integration and Centralization

Carie417 — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 09:57:48 -0600

In this 45-minute recording from the 2006 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, we'll hear from Geoffrey Robert Dengate and Janice Rickards in a session entitled Milking the Model: Getting the Most Out of Integration and Centralization. They will describe the Griffith University model for the delivery of information services, highlighting the benefits it provides and factors facilitating its success, and will conclude with speculation on further development of the model in the future.

The Wizard of SOA

smiltenb — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 13:09:26 -0600

I spent all day yesterday at an Oracle Fusion Middleware: Higher Education Oracle SOA Workshop. It was a great opportunity to get an introduction to SOA methodology and the Oracle toolset. In a past life (for about five minutes) I pretended to be a programmer and application developer (OK, even a DBA). But really, I just knew enough to break stuff.

The first part of the workshop was thrilling. I had one of those “a-ha” moments where suddenly everything you’re working on and technology finally align; and in that one perfect moment everything comes together in absolute clarity!

A few weeks ago we launched an initiative at Maryland Institute College of Art called “MICA Connected”. The goal of this two year project is to re-define our web presence and our web services – to connect all of our systems and processes in a way that is much more accessible to our communities -- and in a way that greatly improves our business and the services we offer. (Reminder: this is a blog. I work in the Technology department – not PR or Communications. This is my characterization of the project; not an official statement from Maryland Institute College of Art.)

Some key components to MICA Connected are:

Web site redesign (I hesitate to use the phrase “web site” because we’re really talking about every aspect of our web presence)
Oracle upgrades (Learning Solutions 8.1 to 9.0; Enterprise Portal 8.4 to 9.0; Financials 7.5 to 9.0 – all completed by June 2008)
Portal redesign (If you want to know more about the future of portals, come to Gettysburg College in June for a fantastic conference)

For more than a year, I’ve been absolutely convinced that this vision of MICA Connected is the direction we need to go in (from a technology perspective). However, I have such a minimal understanding (OK….no understanding) of the current tools and methodologies that can be used to make this a reality. My “a-ha!” moment came today when we were talking about SOA and standards based communications. The concept that components of our Oracle system (PeopleSoft Enterprise is what they’re calling it these days) can be exposed and accessible so that we can seamlessly integrate information into Blackboard, Resource25, our public website, WebTMA, Diebold and anything else we could hope for. In the first two hours of this class it was as if all the grand forces aligned to deliver a real solution to our goals.

I didn’t see it coming, and it was…of course…to good to be true.

The next four hours of the class were a lab where we got to build our own SOA services using data from an Oracle/PeopleSoft Learning Solution database. I cannot overstate the value of this kind of hands-on work. Even though we followed templates and utilized some shortcuts – the experience of building not one; not two; but three SOA applications in the lab environment was terrific. For me, however, this also paralleled Dorothy’s experience of seeing the wizard revealed.

Here’s what’s behind the curtain:

BPEL processes only work if you pay extra money to Oracle to license the BPEL process manager (or monitor or something like that. Yes, I KNOW you’ve already licensed their application server).
Oracle is touting SOA as this “change oriented” architecture – and I do get that. But those of you who have experience with PeopleSoft; hear me now: any SOA applications you develop are customizations. These programs exist outside your Oracle/PeopleSoft system, but presumably plug into those systems. What happens when Oracle changes your table definitions; or changes the underlying logic of their applications? It’s back to the drawing board for your developers – without any delivered tools to that alert you of the changes you’ll need to make in your SOA applications.
Remember workflow in PeopleSoft release 7.5?

Disclaimer: my comments are not reflecting those made by Oracle or any of its employees. They are my own distillations based on direct experience and feedback during the workshop. I’d appreciate any comments of correction.

I understand that software applications that build in “best practice” services don’t work for many institutions (we’re all unique, I know). SOA provides us with a great opportunity to really integrate systems and impose our unique business logic on our applications without violating the integrity of the underlying application.

But this is what I don’t get: a) we have to pay for it (licensing more products) and b) we have to develop it (and development of SOA applications seems overly complex to me)

Some of these questions may not matter to larger institutions who already have teams of developers/resources committed to integrations. But I think the impact on smaller institutions is significant. My initial reactions to SOA:

It is too complex! Not only does it require several smart and experienced people on your staff, it requires on-going care and feeding
The Oracle suite seems buggy and not integrated. I have no experience with any other SOA developer tools but we had problems in our lab because we didn’t save things at the right time – or we had to close and reopen our project to get things to work. There were at least three different logins that we needed to use in order to access all the components of application. That’s so Windows 95.
I don’t see how SOA is any more portable and adaptable than other architectures – sure the built-in accessible is huge. (I mean, HUGE). However, the code and programs are still dependent on all the underlying applications. In this respect, how different is it from Cold Fusion, SQR, Application Engine, HTML, etc.? If those underlying applications change, we still need to update our SOA (or Cold Fusion or SQR, or HTML) application.
And as far as tweaking or re-tooling applications, we made an error in one of our project components – yet we were allowed to build all the sub-components; save the project and only at run-time determine that there was a mistake. After fixing the initial mistake, we then realized that we had to fix all the sub-components (which had inherited the mistake, but not the fix) Hmmmpf!

I truly don’t know if this is my lack of understanding or an unrealistic expectation – but isn’t there an easier way? Shouldn’t our enterprise software vendors be providing us with more than just tools that we need pay additional license fees for; that require significant retraining and significant maintenance? How much do higher ed institutions spend on these systems, and shouldn’t it be reasonable to expect that vendors provide us with innovative, practical, manageable solutions that give us room to adapt to individual needs; but also include a basic set of operating principles? Isn’t is reasonable to expect that someone in my role – comfortable with technology and fairly savvy with the systems we’re using -- should be able to improve the way our systems perform business without having to create a project, dedicate a developer and dedicate several months for development?

Perhaps I’m just grumpy because I thought tools and technology finally caught up with my utopian notion of the way systems should serve businesses. I just can’t escape feeling disappointed and mislead that something really great was on the horizon – something that wouldn’t take us back; but would propel us forward.

Disagree? Tell me – tell me that I’ve got it all wrong and this is the reason why managers should never try to be techies! Or share your thoughts of commiseration….

EDUCAUSE2006 Podcast: Community Source Development

Carie417 — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 17:58:28 -0600

In this 50-minute recording from the 2006 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference, we'll hear from Leo Fernig and Richard Spencer in a session entitled Community Source Development of a Next-Generation Student System. They'll share how the University of British Columbia is working with other institutions to develop a community source, next-generation student system that will use a service-oriented architecture.

E2005 Podcast: Partnering to Achieve Campus Technology Needs

podcaster — Wed, 29 Mar 2006 17:56:10 -0600

This 49 minute recording provides coverage of the 2005 EDUCAUSE Annual Conference Session entitled A Technical and Nontechnical Model of Partnering to Achieve Campus Technology Needs.