Winter 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://its.augustana.edu/techknowledge.  Enjoy! 

In this issue:
New people in ITS
Office 2007/2008 Update
Passwords - Change is Good!
The Bandwidth Blues
Datatel Colleague Update
Tip - Changing your Password

New people in ITS

The ITS department is happy to announce that we have added a new programmer analyst to our staff. Lillian Bradshaw comes to us from Mississippi Bend Area Education Agency where she was a student accounts consultant. Prior to that, Lillian worked in the IT department at St. Ambrose University.

Lillian and her husband, Ted, a system administrator with the Department of Defense with the Rock Island Arsenal, live in Eldridge. They enjoy traveling to foreign lands and tasting ethnic dishes. They have two sons, Christopher, 32, and Patrick, 29.   Please help us in welcoming Lillian to Augustana! 
 
   While he has worked part time for the college since 2005, ITS is excited to welcome Tim Stevenson on staff full-time.   Tim is our new Web Programming Specialist. Tim's web programming days began with Dr. Jon Clauss teaching a “Basics of HTML” course while attending Augustana from 94-96. Tim eventually transferred to Berklee College of Music in Boston where he completed his Bachelor’s and focused on guitar studies. He has played guitar for nearly 20 years. His computer work experiences have ranged from hardware and network technician at a local law firm to web programmer for a multimedia company in Moline.

 

Office 2007/2008 Update
Dennis Hurd, ITS

ITS is currently studying the feasibility of doing an upgrade of our Office XP system. Office 2007 (Office 2008 for Macintosh) is the newest version of Office by Microsoft and initial testing of the software indicates it will play well with our other software on campus PCs. We will test it as much as we can before deploying it to the user community and have not as yet experienced any major problems.  Most new PCs purchased now have this software installed and many students have been using it for several months on new computers they have purchased.

Once our testing stage is complete, we will inform the faculty, staff and administration of an implementation plan and probably start to do the upgrades either at the end of spring term or at the beginning of the summer.

One of the nice upgrades of the Office 2007 suite is a better Spam and junk e-mail filter in Outlook 2007 for Windows. The ITS network group has in place a very good spam filter which eliminates over 90% of unwanted incoming mail, but the new Outlook makes it even easier to control those unwanted messages.

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.

Passwords -- change is good!
Beth Whitty, ITS

In order to improve security and to comply with recommended industry computing practices, Augustana is adopting a new password policy for our network passwords.  Passwords are used to control access to Augustana College systems, networks, applications, accounts, and data. A compromised password puts a user's email and files at risk, and may expose sensitive, confidential personal information residing on college information systems. All users are responsible for taking the appropriate steps to select and secure their passwords. 

Starting March 31st, 2008, ITS will begin to expire passwords and require passwords be changed at least every 180 days across campus (Faculty, Staff, Administrators and Students).  Below are the guidelines for the Password Policy for Augustana College: 

Some systems that will be affected by the network password policy change are: Outlook Web Access, Exchange email, Intranet web access, Moodle, Datatel, WebAdvisor, Ingeniux, and Astra.

A method for changing your password from a Macintosh or via the web will be coming soon.  Look for more detailed information coming soon about passwords!

 

The Bandwidth Blues
Sean McBride, ITS

The demand for bandwidth, or network traffic capacity, has grown exponentially the past several years -- so much that it can make it impossible to get email from off campus or do academic work over the campus network. While Information Technology Services tries to strike a balance between pursuit of academic goals using the network and recreational use, high traffic sites like YouTube can easily be used for educational use as well as recreational use.  The table on the right provides some perspective on the size of files being sent over our network and Internet connection. As you can see, it does not take long for even a robust network like Augustana’s to become inundated with music and web video files.
 

(chart from Hartwick College Technology Services, www.hartwick.edu)

So, how can you help conserve bandwidth?


  

Datatel Colleague update
Chris Vaughan, ITS

The AIMS project has officially entered Phase II. "What is Phase II", you might ask? Well, if you remember, Phase I was simply to implement the new software in a very "vanilla" fashion. The goal was to provide the services that would benefit the students the most, as quickly as possible. The campus worked very hard to successfully reach this goal. Students can now check available courses, register, and check grades - all online. Very shortly, students and advisors will have the ability to review a student's academic progress towards a degree or check the unfulfilled requirements, should a student decides to change majors, on demand.
In order to provide the students with these utilities, many operational reports, processes and functions that existed using the legacy system, SIMON, were placed on hold unless they were deemed critical to the College mission. 
Phase II essentially consists of examining and prioritizing those "set aside" issues given current resources. A very simplistic view of the prioritization weighting is:
The overall goal of Phase II is to reach the levels of efficiency the campus operated under prior to taking this major step toward offering our students a much richer suite of information services. 

 

Tip - changing your password (on Windows)
Beth Whitty, ITS

1. Log into any Windows computer on campus
2. Press Ctrl – Alt – Delete
3. Click on the Change Password… button
4. Enter your username (FirstnameLastname), your old password, a new password and then type in your new password again to confirm.
5. Click OK
6. When you get back to the first screen- click Cancel

 

Have a great rest of winter term & Spring Break!