The Hub: Published By, For and About ITS

Three ITS employees recently attended the 15^th annual Residential Networking (ResNet) Symposium at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. Chris Williams, ResNET program director, Jeremy Buenviaje, ResNET assistant program director and Paul Kamen, ResNET web applications developer, spent three days networking with their counterparts who represented over 100 colleges and universities from throughout the United States and Canada. Continue Reading

The next Webmasters meeting will feature presentations on the content management systems Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal. The meeting will be held on Thursday, Aug. 7, from 2-3 p.m. in ITS Manning 2400.

Jonathan Pletzke, an experienced technical leader, project manager and author, will present on Joomla and Wordpress. Judy Hallman, a retired campus webmaster and former Tier 2 analyst in the ITS Response Center, will focus on Drupal.

The topic of the August Instructional Applications Interest Group (IAIG) meeting is “Toy Stories.” If you have a piece of technology you can’t live without or a device that makes work life easier, bring your “toy” to room 328, Health Sciences Library on Thursday, Aug. 7 at 11:30 a.m. Share your experiences and recommendations!

Welcome Vetrivel Thiagarajan to Enterprise Resource Planning, effective July 7…Mark Wampole to User Support and Engagement, effective July 21… Kevin Sumner to Infrastructure and Operations, effective July 23…and Terrelle Buckner and William Poehls to Enterprise Resource Planning, effective July 28.

Farewell to Dan Blanchette of Research Computing, effective July 18 and Donna Roch of Enterprise Applications, effective July 25.

Proposals for presentations at the 2008 UNC CAUSE conference are now being accepted through Aug. 15. The 2008 UNC CAUSE conference will be held at the Greensboro Marriot Downtown from Nov. 17-19. The theme of the conference is “The University of North Carolina Tomorrow: Striving for Excellence through Technology and Collaboration.”

The program committee is inviting proposals for presentations, discussions, and Birds of a Feather groups. Proposals should be submitted through the 2008 UNC CAUSE Web site by Aug. 15. Notification of successful presenters will be made by the end of August. Continue Reading

ITS is growing – and on the move! Due to the temporary demand for additional space resulting from the ERP student system implementation, several location changes are underway.

Moves that will alleviate the current shortfall are as follows:

• On July 25, Desktop Infrastructure, Infrastructure Management and Enterprise Storage Management will move from ITS Manning to ITS Franklin.
• Also on July 25, the Carolina Computing Initiative (CCI) staff currently at ITS Franklin will join their colleagues already at ITS Manning.
• The Learning Space Design group has relocated from ITS Manning to the Porthole building.
• The Identity Management group has moved from ITS Franklin to ITS Manning. Continue Reading

Recently, a message encouraging flexible work arrangements was sent from Brenda Malone, associate vice chancellor for Human Resources, to the University community in acknowledgment of the unprecedented increase in the price of gasoline and the burden it places on UNC-Chapel Hill employees. The University encouraged individual units to perform their own assessments and determine the best approach for their staff.

In an effort to consider all viable options for ITS, Vice Chancellor and CIO Larry Conrad and ITS senior management focused on the issue of flexible work arrangements and reviewed various options – including flexible work hours, 4-day work weeks and telework.

The conclusion was that ITS is limited to offering staff the option of flexible work hours. Continue Reading

Following a brief mid-summer break, the Carolina Training and Orientation Program Sessions (CTOPS) are back in full swing. Throughout the summer, the University will host close to 4,000 first-year and transfer students at the two-day sessions, offering students a solid foundation on which to build their life at Carolina.

ITS’ contribution to CTOPS requires collaboration and a huge commitment of staff from all of the major ITS divisions. Each group works with other teams from across campus to prepare facilities, software, hardware, processes and applications to ensure a smooth introduction to technology for new students. Continue Reading