You are reading the 21st issue of The Hub, the newsletter that is published by, for, and about ITS. The goal of this publication is to provide each other with timely information about the services and activities of our department and to support the ITS community. Submit your stories and announcements to its_communications@unc.edu by 5 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 2, 2005, to be included in the next issue.
There are only four business days left to reserve your place at the ITS Franklin Opening Celebration on Friday, Nov. 4, 2005.
The afternoon’s festivities will begin with a ceremonial ribbon cutting at 3 p.m., hosted by Dan Reed and Chancellor Moeser. A reception and open house will follow until 5:00 p.m. ITS staff are encouraged to tour the facilities and take a look at the new offices, meeting spaces and machine room. Refreshments will be provided, and AVCs will be around to chat and answer questions about the move.
An electronic invitation to the event has been issued to all of ITS. Should your spam filters have blocked the electronic Sendomatic brand invitation from your e-mail inbox, click here to access it directly and submit your response.
All RSVPs should be submitted online by Monday, Oct. 31, 2005. We look forward to seeing you on the 4th!–MRB
The 9th Annual Carolina Technology Consultants (CTC) Retreat was held on Thursday, Oct. 20, in Sitterson Hall and the computer lab in Peabody Hall. The event drew 147 registrations, said Dee Marley, the CTC’s facilitator and a member of ITS–Communications.
ITS’s AVC for Infrastructure and Operations, Judd Knott, joined representatives from the Schools of Public Health and Medicine to offer a keynote panel on disaster prevention and disaster recovery. ITS staff were involved in other sessions as well. Jim Gogan and Todd Lane, both of ITS–Telecommunications, spoke about the status, future and caveats of campus Wi-Fi. A spyware class, presented by Alan Forrest and ITS’s associate director for information security, Andrew Lee, was “packed,” said Marley.
In keeping with the mission of the CTC, sessions were offered by technology professionals from across campus. Two additional offerings were Charlie Hitlin, who described the School of Medicine’s experience with developing a curriculum management system using Plone; and Todd Nicolet, Doug Edmunds and Sarah Paliulis, who gave an account of how the Schools of Public Health, Education and Pharmacy joined forces to evaluate and acquire Macromedia’s Breeze software.
Another very popular topic had to do with career banding and using banding for career development, presented by Linc Butler and Jason McDaniel from UNC’s Office of Human Resources. HR also sent Cliff Turner and Felecia Perry to help members review their resumes in light of changes brought about by career banding. The by-appointment-only review sessions were very popular, Marley said; next year she would like to expand the number of appointments available.
Marley said that the most fun of the day was the demonstrations of the computer science department’s virtual environment labs, arranged by Missy Woods, a department employee. In the graphics laboratory, Erik Andersen, an undergraduate student with the Geometric Algorithms for Modeling, Motion, and Animation (GAMMA) research group, demonstrated work with interactive haptic painting. Andersen also demonstrated the Sony Aibo programming project, “Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks.” In the head-mounted display laboratory, visitors were immersed in what the computer science department fondly calls “the pit.” Jeremy Wendt, Drew Chen and Luv Kholi of the Effective Virtual Environments (EVE) research group ran the demo. Professor David Stotts demonstrated the Facetop (transparent video interface) research project.
The retreat also included food, a variety of door prizes and lots of opportunities for discussions with peers.
Watch for videos of the sessions to be posted to the CTC Web site.
ITS Enterprise Data Management, consisting of the Database Administration, Data Warehousing, Enterprise Reporting, Shared Storage and Scientific Database Support teams, has seen a busy fall semester. Read on to find out what they’ve been up to.
As part of the efforts to consolidate and update ITS-managed Oracle databases, the Database Administration team recently assumed management of the Oracle databases for the Blackboard and Remedy services. This will ease the performance of complex, time-consuming tasks such as coordinating the application of Oracle security patches. The team is also participating in the server consolidation efforts led by ITS Infrastructure and Operations.
The Data Warehouse team, which includes the Institutional Research support staff, has acquired new business intelligence tools from SAS Institute that will be installed, configured and deployed throughout the fiscal year. Among those tools, the Finance subject area includes additional data and the HR area includes new applications. More detailed information regarding this service and project is located on the Institutional Research Web site.
Over 120 campus customers and ITS members have participated in training sessions led by the Enterprise Reporting team for the new features and functionality within WebFOCUS. The team has worked closely with Information Builders, Inc., the vendor for WebFOCUS, to develop the training materials and sessions. The latest version of the product goes live very soon.
As previously announced in The Hub, AFS service, which provides file sharing and storage options for campus Web sites, applications, and online services, will no longer be supported by IBM after April 2006. The project to evaluate equivalent replacement products is led by the Shared Storage team, with support and contributions from other Enterprise Data Management teams and staff members of ITS Infrastructure and Operations and ITS Research Computing.
Since the last profile of EDM, the Enterprise Data Discovery and Recovery team has been reassigned to the Infrastructure and Operations division to consolidate and streamline related services. The Scientific Database Support position is currently vacant; Database Administration staff are filling in where needed.—Steve Cornelison with The Hub staff
Dan writes, “We continue to do budget and cost analyses as part of our ERP planning process. Stephanie Szakal, Robyn and I are preparing a brief document that outlines our best estimates of costs. In addition, look for the campus strategic IT planning committee to be kicked off very soon.”
As board chair of the Computing Research Association, Dan writes a quarterly column for their members. His most recent essay will appear in the upcoming November issue of Computing Research News (Vol. 17, No. 5), and discusses “Computing Education and Careers: Perceptions, Myth and Reality.” In it he dispels the myth that computer science careers are going the way of the passenger pigeon and the woolly mammoth. He offers ideas for addressing perceived problems in computing education, and suggests that perhaps it is “time for us to rethink some of our long-held assumptions about the computing curriculum and its relevance.” The article will be posted on the Computing Research Association’s Web site in early November.
ITS Franklin is almost complete—furniture is being installed and the parking lot has been paved. The final inspections should be done by Nov. 9. Moves are scheduled to begin on Nov. 14. On Sunday, Oct. 23, the commissioning and functional testing of building systems began. The testing lasted about 5 hours, with only minor issues reported. All issues should be repaired by Nov. 9. The Dell high-performance computer is scheduled to arrive Nov. 1.
ITS Manning is progressing along nicely. The structural steel and fireproofing are complete, as are the concrete slab floors. Mechanical, electrical and plumbing overhead rough-in has started on the second floor. Currently there are no problems with the construction schedule.–Mike Harris
Sometimes the best way to embrace the future is to celebrate the past. ITS has a history of more than 30 years with the University’s facility at 440 West Franklin Street, now called ITS Franklin.
The University purchased and renovated the building in 1974, using it as office space for various business departments, such as the budget and comptroller’s offices, travel, purchasing and others. What is now ITS has been there from that beginning; because the business offices needed computers to manage their data and perform tasks, the Administrative Data Processing (ADP) department was also assigned to the site and used computer facilities installed in the building by previous owners. ADP (which expanded beyond the confines of the Franklin Street property) later became Administrative Information Services (AIS), which in turn gave way to ITS.
ITS Franklin now consists of a main building and a storage annex used to house the computer’s UPS (uninterruptible power supply) and building infrastructure, such as a standby diesel generator and the HVAC (heating–ventilation–air conditioning) support equipment. What we know as the main building was built in three phases, beginning in 1934 as a small service station with a single gas pump. Customers entered from the Rosemary Street side because the garage was below grade on Franklin Street. Later the site was purchased by the Hospital Savings Association, which added a three-story building with matching brick exterior in 1951 and a third section in 1963. The Hospital Savings Association became Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina, which used the building as its home office until moving to its new headquarters on Chapel Hill Road.
In 2001, AIS made plans to renovate the historic building, including removing asbestos, ensuring compliance with the Americans with Disabilities Act, enlarging the central computer room, performing minor exterior renovations and replacing the electrical, lighting and air conditioning systems. ITS inherited and modified those plans with its creation in 2004.–Richard Ellington with HKC
