Vendor Selection

Western Michigan University has been operating electronic messaging for students, staff, and faculty for many years. Aligning the strategy and overall policy with actions is key to success. See how WMU has addressed the challenges in the past and is doing so today. Find out what challenges we foresee in the future. Additionally, Sun Microsystems will present its vision for addressing the challenges it sees.

Course management systems provide many features that enhance teaching and learning. Choosing one from among the many systems available is a major decision and commitment for any institution. The best way to evaluate a CMS is a semester-long test to ensure that both instructors and students gain a deep understanding of its features and limitations. Currently we are conducting a CMS project in which three platforms are running simultaneously: Blackboard, Moodle, and Sakai. The project will evaluate the usability/management for each. This presentation will discuss the challenges and lessons learned during our project.

Jacksonville University has seen tremendous benefit from using RedDot’s web content management server, RedDot CMS. RedDot’s straightforward interface enabled faculty and staff to quickly overcome resistance to managing their own content. Faculty and staff use of RedDot CMS has translated to external benefit by pushing content to the web faster, resulting in a fresher site with more relevant content.

Whether used for emergency notification or campus outreach, a quick and reliable mass notification service is a requisite for every university campus. Although choosing a mass notification system can be a daunting task, industry standards can help your campus leaders choose the right system for their needs. Whether your institution seeks a mass notification service for emergency use or to help with student enrollment and retention, this session will help you and your technology team lead your campus through the process of deciding which system to purchase. You’ll learn the industry standards and speak with other campuses that have gone through the mass notification selection process.

How can a university community collaborate to prioritize requests for new academic technologies, focus resources, and meet instructional needs? This session will first provide an overview of the selection and implementation process for a classroom clicker system at one university. Next it will address best practices in classroom use, starting with the question, How do you engage freshman in a required survey course of American history? Find out how an instructional technologist reaches into his magician's bag of tricks to see what will work over the course of an academic year.

Managing, documenting, and controlling service activities is one of the biggest issues facing an IT organization. Enterprise Information Technology Services (EITS) within the University of Georgia approached the problem by implementing the Clarity Portfolio and Project Management tool and adapting it to meet the needs of both project and service management. We will discuss the process we used to determine the activities our organization is accomplishing and to implement a tool to capture data to document those activities and help plan for the future.

Baylor University has spent two years working on a large-scale deployment of whole disk encryption. The session will present the process from selecting the encryption technology to the culminating deployment process. The result is mediation of data loss that can result from the loss or theft of a technology asset.

One of the first decisions facing campuses that have decided to deploy a PKI is whether to build their PKI in house, with the necessary personnel and infrastructure it entails, or to buy their PKI from a vendor, which can have a seemingly high sticker price. What are the driving factors behind this decision? How do you accurately assess all costs, both short- and long-term? How do you measure the benefits/ROI of a given choice? What signing options should you consider? Come to this session to participate in a discussion with panelists who have made decisions in each of these directions.

Bryant University implemented the Citrix Presentation Server to provide students with access to lab applications on their laptops. Faculty and staff looking to "share" application licenses can do so using our Microsoft SoftGrid environment. This presentation will describe our technology and rationale for implementing these solutions.

This session will cover how Massachusetts College of Art and Design implemented a new help desk ticketing system. Come hear what we learned and how we made it succeed.