Conference Management Application – is in the process of being developed, and will allow departments and researcher to have conference attendees register online. The program will capture basic profiles necessary to register individuals, and will have the ability to receive credit card payments. The application will have an interface which will allow the conference coordinator to review participants’ requests, and have the ability to update the conferences schedule of events as needed.

iGrade – Enhanced for the fall quarter, faculty view now filters out classes where the number of students listed is zero. Faculty can now opt-in to participate in the iGrade pilot. Classes will be listed when they opt-in and they will need to register the classes that they want to use iGrade for. Information will be passed onto the Registrar’s office to make them aware of which classes need manual entries into the Student Information System. More information and enhancements can be found at: http://cnc.ucr.edu/igrade

iEval – The Scantron portion was piloted for faculty during the summer quarter, and worked successfully. Grad Division selected faculty from their unit to be reviewed online, and the rest were reviewed with the standard Scantron form. Scantron data is extracted from another application and uploaded to the iEval system via the interface and stored in the Oracle database. The next step is to have everyone transition to using the online application and discard the use of manual forms.

Extension Front End – is being developed for University Extensions to allow online registration for their students. The program will allow students to view courses offered, select them into a “shopping cart”, and pay online via credit card. Information will then be transferred to their Q2 Student Information System. Both systems will use Oracle as their database and this will facilitate the writing of stored procedures to work on both systems.

New Training Approach – Teaming up with the Human Resource’s group on campus, CVC has developed online training modules that use Flash, Camtasia, HTML and an Oracle database to present on demand training to the campus. The training modules are available via the HR Training web site where staff members can login and build a profile. With their profile, they can view the available online courses offered and sign up online. A final assessment is given to each user in which they must pass with a score of 80% or higher in order to get access to the financial systems at UCR.

Data Center Generator - The installation was a success. Documentation is being completed. Future work may include a notification system and web-based monitoring and control of the UPS.

Anti-Virus Site License: In an effort to stay on-top of anti-virus products, C&C has purchased a campus-wide site license for Sophos AV. The software will be available at the central server for any faculty, staff or residence hall student to download using either Windows or Macintosh machine. A firewall component will be incorporated in the next release scheduled for year-end 2005.

Anti-Spyware Site License: Computing and Communications has also purchased a campus-wide site license of the anit-spyware product from Webroot called SpySweeper. The software will be available at the central server for any faculty, staff or residence hall student to download only for Windows machines.

Fall 2005 Faculty and Staff Handbooks – The latest versions of these annually produced documents have been completed. They serve as a roadmap to help faculty and staff discover the IT services offered by UCR Computing and Communications.

Sourcefire / Intrusion Detection System - Computing and Communications evaluated several IDS vendor products and have decided to use Sourcefire. The initial configuration will watch traffic on our six campus entry/exit points, as well as traffic to/from residence halls, wireless, and our library subnets. It is expected that this configuration will be deployed by the end of the year.

Cisco Intrusion Detection Blade and MARS Evaluation - The College of Engineering has purchased a Cisco (formerly Protego) MARS (Monitoring Analysis and Response System) device and and has allowed us to participate in evaluating it. The appliance centrally aggregates logs and events from network devices (such as routers and switches), security devices and applications (such as firewalls, intrusion detection, vulnerability scanners, and anti-virus), hosts (such as Windows, Solaris and Linux syslogs), applications (such as databases, web servers, and authentication servers), and network traffic (such as Cisco NetFlow). The evaluation process is continuing, but the device looks promising for reducing the number of false positives when detecting intrusions, and allowing us to set up automated blocks of inappropriate traffic flowing onto campus and traffic leaving campus.

Nessus Scanning System - In order to provide a way for people on campus to scan their desktop systems, we've built a self-scan web page based on the open-source package Nessus. Though still in development, the page allows anyone on campus to have the machine from which they access the self-scan page to be scanned. In addition, it allows network administrators to scan specific hosts or a range of hosts.

Black Hole software - Based on work and ideas from Berkeley and UCSB, our black-hole web page allows us to identify off-campus machines as being non-routable to any on-campus machines, thereby preventing inappropriate traffic from entering the UCR intranet, eliminating an off-campus threat. This page is currently being used by network analysts, and will eventually be incorporated into an automated border traffic blocking mechanism.

Scripted port shutoff - Once a UCR machine has been identified as compromised, finding the particular switch and port to which it is attached can be difficult and time consuming. We have developed a script with a web interface that accepts as input a machine or list of machines (by IP), and locates it's switch and port, and shuts it off. This substantially reduces the amount of manual effort to shut down infected campus machines, and will eventually be used in an automated port shutoff system.

Wireless Network Update - There are currently 475 active access points on campus. These include coverage for common areas, media ready classrooms, conference rooms, labs, and areas where wired connections are not practical or convenient. In the next couple months, there will be 70 new access points installed to fill the coverage requests from department Chairs. In addition to these, there are several new requests including the greenhouses near lot 11, some offices at University Village, and expanded coverage at all residence halls, which will add about 10-15 new access points.

Engineering II Building - Over the last few months as the new building for the College of Engineering has been completed, the level of collaboration between COE and C&C has greatly increased. COE's evaluation of available equipment for the new network led them to choose Cisco. This created a vendor alignment with the rest of the campus and has resulted in the ability of C&C to provide new levels of support. It has also created the opportunity for increased collaboration. To date there have been a number of joint evaluations of subsystems. It is expected that this type of activity will continue unabated and that there will be increasing opportunities for cross-training and the sharing of experience between the two teams.

Funding Allocated for Mainframe Upgrade - Funding has been allocated to upgrade the mainframe to a z890 Model 150. This machine is a 175 MIP machine, and will run all of our existing software, and alleviate the strain during peak periods, and allow for growth.

On-line Holds in Testing (update) - The On-line Holds project is in the initial testing stage right now. The student will have a central location on GROWL to view all of his holds (Student Business Services, Registration, Financial Aid, and move) including a link to his enrollment/advising holds if any exist. Concurrently, SIS users have equivalent screens, to give them a view of what the student is seeing. We are currently checking all new screens in both SIS and GROWL. This project is expected to be in beta testing in a by the end of September, and complete and in production in time for Winter Enrollment.

On-line Transcript Ordering / Credit Card Payments in Beta Testing (update) - Online Transcript ordering on GROWL allowing credit card payment is now in the final stages of testing. The Registrar’s Office is doing the final check out of the process, and if approval comes soon, could be in production by early October.

Summer Session Develop to be a Major Effort (update / overview) - State support of Summer Session has implications in all areas of Student Information Systems. In order to best facilitate the all of these areas, the Summer Session project is being approached as a unit, with components reaching throughout SIS. Major changes are required in Registration, Billing, and Financial Aid to facilitate the non-traditional nature of Summer Sessions, including cross campus enrollment.

Improvements to Degree Audit System Request (update) – C&C will be developing improved views of SIS degree audit. These improvements will include web access displays, overviews, drill downs, and forecasting “what if” scenarios.

Tools for Student Advising to be Investigated (update) - With Phase I of student enrollment/advising on GROWL complete and in production, we are in the process of evaluating the next phase. This phase will include enhanced tools for the advisors, to aid in the evaluation and advising process, as well as improvements to the Degree Audit System.

VCR to Chair a Research Technology Advisory Group - The integration of technology into the research environment will require a partnership between C&C and Researchers. To spearhead this movement, the Vice Chancellor of Research will Chair a Research Technology Advisory Group. This Advisory Group will develop the vision for the next few years for incorporating the future needs of technology infrastructure in support of Research.

Funding for a Research Technologist - C&C received funding from Campus Executive Management for a high level programmer to coordinate the development and implementation of a Vision for Research Technology. Some initial projects being considered are a campus computational server, a visualization rendering services and a display infrastructure.

VCUA to Potentially Partner on new Advancement System - C&C has embarked on an aggressive plan to partner with University Advancement for the development and implementation of a comprehensive suit of systems related to: Advancement / Development Database and Web Application, UCR Gift Accounting (Foundation and Regents) System and other requirements such as an On-line Community for UCR Supporters.