Spring 2008

Welcome
Shawn Beattie, ITS, editor

Welcome to Augie Techknowledge from ITS, an e-newsletter to share "what's new" in ITS and provide useful tips and articles on Information Technology and Educational Technology at Augustana. We hope you like it and find it useful. The newsletter will be archived on the ITS web site at http://campus.augustana.edu/offices/its/techknowledge. Enjoy!

Office 2007 (for Windows PCs) and Office 2008 (for Mac OS X) are planned to be fully implemented on campus by the start of the Fall 2008 school year. It has been six to seven years since we last upgraded Microsoft Office on campus, having skipped the Office 2003 release. Many significant improvements will be realized by the upgrade. Excel users will now bask in the possibility of over a million rows of data. Word users will enjoy the uncluttered ribbon interface. And Powerpoint users will enjoy many new themes, including wide-screen support.

So far, the Tredway Library staff has been converted as well as several offices in Founders Hall. The reaction has been favorable and most issues have been minor. The update will continue throughout the summer on a department by department basis, often in conjunction with hardware updates.

Beth Whitty will be conducting some training classes this spring on the new software and we anticipate it will be implemented on an office by office basis if no compatibility issues arise. By fall of 2008, we hope to have the entire campus including all labs on Microsoft Office 2007/2008.

ITS department is doing its part in the responsible purchase and use of PCs and related equipment. We purchase Energy Star rated equipment, and as little documentation as possible. We recycle all of the packing materials that the equipment is shipped in. Cardboard is recycled, plastic bags are reused when possible, and all extra paper products are recycled. Even some of the foam packing is reused when possible. ITS is switching campus monitors to LCD displays, which use less energy and create less heat than the larger tube monitors.

When computers have reached the end of their life cycle, or are damaged beyond repair, they are first cleaned of any files or data on them, then are donated to local non-profit organizations. Many of them have been sent to a seminary in Africa for reuse there. Batteries from laptops are recycled also.

Limiting the environmental impact of PCs and Macs when they are used on campus has been and will continue to be a major goal of the ITS department. We ask for your help in this area and thank the entire user community for your support.

ITS has been looking into ways that the campus can consume less resources when it comes to printing on campus. Each year, millions of pages are printed in the campus labs alone. The cost in terms of paper, toner, printer maintenance, and the overall carbon and energy footprint of printing has become unacceptable. In order to encourage good stewardship of campus resources, ITS has worked with SGA, the library, and campus committees to discuss and recommend changes to the campus printing policy. Effective this fall, each student will be allocated a printing quota, which will be equivalent to about 1200 pages per calendar year. Double sided printing will be encouraged by charging less per page for duplex printing. Students will be allowed to exceed their quota, but will be charged per page at the end of the academic year.

ITS is also adopting a policy of discouraging personal printers and encouraging networked printers. Personal printers are much less energy efficient, and network printers are more likely to have double-sided capability.

Faculty and staff will be encouraged to participate in this new program by monitoring their own usage. A self-service web page will be able to show how many pages you have printed and your recent print jobs. Users may also be e-mailed a report on their printing totals each academic term.

ITS thanks you for your cooperation in reducing the printing on campus wherever possible.

We are bringing a great new e-mail system to Augustana College students. Google Apps is a reliable, feature-rich suite of communication and collaboration tools. Faculty and staff accounts will remain on Microsoft Exchange and Microsoft Outlook.

On June 2nd, ITS will begin moving all current first year, sophomore, and junior students' Microsoft Exchange e-mail accounts to a Google Apps GMail account. The creation of these accounts will begin in alphabetical order by last name. The entire conversion of accounts will most likely take several weeks. Graduating Senior accounts will not be converted.

Why Google apps? Google Apps currently offers 6649 MB (6 gigabytes) of storage account as compared to the 12mb of storage currently allowed for student accounts -- no more closed e-mail boxes due to a large attachment! Some additional features include excellent SPAM filtering, Google Talk, Google Calendar, and Google Docs - allowing students to create documents, spreadsheets and presentations and collaborate with each other in real-time right inside a web browser window.

Students' e-mail addresses will NOT change as part of the transition; just the webmail interface used to retrieve e-mail. Stay tuned for more about this transition; students will be offered training courses in the fall to show some of the great new features.

Carlsson Hall progress
Shawn Beattie, ITS