Information Technology Services at UNC-Chapel Hill

He’s drawn to southern college towns. His skateboarding hobby resulted in a passion for urban planning. He loves barbecue, music and is married to a “coal miner’s daughter” from Appalachia.

Who is he? Read The Road to ITS to find out!

"The Road to ITS" appears monthly in ITS News. If you would like to suggest a colleague to be featured in "The Road to ITS." please contact its_communications@unc.edu.

Here are a few reminders of upcoming events and opportunities:

Unsung Hero nominations
Nominate a deserving colleague for an Unsung Hero Award! Nominations should be sent to Diane Strong, Campus Box 1150 by 5 p.m. on Friday, May 29. To obtain a nomination form, please visit the Employee Council Web site. (Please use Internet Explorer as your Web browser to access the nomination form.)

The program for the June meeting of the Instructional Applications Interest Group (IAIG) is titled "PowerPointed: Real-time Revisions." The meeting will take place at 11:30 a.m. on Wednesday, June 3 in Peabody Hall 08F.

At the May IAIG meeting, Karin Reese, Center for Faculty Excellence, gave an overview of some basic principles of PowerPoint slide design. For the June meeting, Reese will revise volunteers' example slides, and apply the design principles in real-time.

Zoe Gillenwater, design services manager of the UNC Highway Safety Research Center, will present on flexible (liquid) CSS-based layouts at the June Webmasters meeting scheduled for Thursday, June 4 at 2 p.m. in ITS Manning.

Gillenwater is the author of Flexible Web Design: Creating Liquid and Elastic Layouts with CSS. 

Load testing, the process of putting demand on a system and measuring its response, is now underway for ConnectCarolina. Conducted over the next six to eight weeks, the load testing will include the following ConnectCarolina components:

• Portal, a Web-based front-end access to PeopleSoft and other enterprise applications
• Identity management
• Online application for undergraduate admissions
• PeopleSoft service-oriented architecture (SOA), a computer systems architectural style for creating and using business processes packaged as services.

Do you work with someone who consistently goes the extra mile or who had a recent accomplishment that deserves recognition? If so, go the extra mile yourself and nominate your colleague for an Unsung Hero Award. Nominations should be sent to Diane Strong, Campus Box 1150 by 5 p.m. on Friday, May 29.

Sponsored by the Employee Council, the Unsung Hero Awards are part of a recognition program designed to honor achievements by ITS staff. To obtain a nomination form, please visit the Employee Council Web site  using Internet Explorer as your Web browser.

Due to current budget concerns, winners will receive three days of leave instead of a cash award. The award presentations will take place at an ITS potluck lunch on June 26 at ITS Franklin.

ITS staff are among the presenters at Lenovo’s 12th Annual ThinkTank. The conference, which will be held at UNC-Chapel Hill June 1-3, is a gathering of colleges, universities and K-12 institutions from around the world who participate in 1:1 student computing programs.

UNC-Chapel Hill employees are eligible for a special reduced conference registration rate of $200. To take advantage of this discount, please register as a regular attendee using the code TTNC200.

ITS presentations include:

A recent upgrade to the Remedy application server has provided several enhancements to the service.

“We now support every browser specific to an operating system,” said David Smith, lead Remedy developer. “That’s particularly good news for Mac and Linux users, since that includes Safari 3+.”

In addition to the expanded browser support, the upgrade also allows for faster response time, enhanced operations with Web services and application support for the iPhone.

In an effort to further scientific discovery at Carolina, ITS Research Computing and the Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI) have deployed the Tar Heel Grid, a new distributed computing system designed to provide high throughput computing services to solve problems that require large amounts of computing cycles in a relatively short time.

Missed Fred Olivieri's presentation "Dynamic UI Functionality for Web Applications" at the May UNC Webmasters meeting? Then be sure to view his PowerPoint presentation online .