Information Systems and Services

We will present Northwestern University's experience with performance testing during our recent upgrade from PeopleSoft v8 to PeopleSoft/Campus Solutions v9. We would like to share our testing experiences in the hope that others can learn from our firsthand experience of what went well and what could have gone better.

The Dartmouth Cyber-Security Initiative is an ongoing collaboration between faculty, staff, and students focused on projects aimed at improving the security of the College's information systems. By coordinating research interests with practical concerns, the initiative has resulted in a number of innovative procedures and tools. One such tool is Achilles. Integrated with popular assessment tools such as Nessus and NMAP, Achilles is an easy to use, enterprise-scale analysis console that allows institutions to rank, manage, and track assessment results for thousands of systems.

The University of Washington's Office of Information Management responsibilities include core business applications, defining data management and application integration practices and policies, managing information systems and business process improvement projects, and establishing a strong developer community. The OIM's role is to align the various information management activities throughout the university.

Additional contributor: William Shirey, Associate Vice Provost, Business Applications, University of Washington

Learn about UW–Milwaukee's experiences designing and implementing a campus-wide system for tracking tutoring, mentoring, and advising activities. Topics will include creating a cross-division taskforce to define requirements, building support at administrative and department levels, leading a user-driven iterative development process, promotion, training, and creating a support network.

UNCW has begun a new initiative to develop and test a wide range of information services accessible through mobile devices. This session will compare the relative costs and advantages of applications based on SMS text messaging, WAP browsers, and Java MIDlets as well as the structuring of the relationship between the faculty start-up and the institution to develop and pursue the resulting initiatives.

SOA can provide a secure, reliable, and agile architecture that benefits the entire institution.

Our inquiry begins with brief presentations about each of several applications, application suites, or application frameworks that are in use or being readied for use to meet the needs of a range of collaboration scenarios. Each presentation will be a condensed and concise summary of the key requirements and design decisions motivating the approach taken.

The authors argue that most utilities have become standardized commodities that are no longer evolving, campus IT is in a constant state of change.  Therefore, it should not be relegated to commodity status.