May 2006

eBuy: eCatalog (via Sciquest Web Services Interface) Shopping in Production. This e-Procurement module is now in production within the campus Purchasing system (eBuy). The system allows campus users to search vendor catalogs electronically for best price/availability, and place the orders with the vendors electronically. The system is in active use across the campus.

PAMIS (Proposal and Award Management Information System): Electronic Campus Approval Form (eCAF) Testing Complete. UCR has completed final testing of an Electronic Campus Approval Form (supporting extramural funds requests) and is now implementing final changes in preparation for deployment.

Academic Personnel: eFile Development Underway. Phase two Academic Personnel system development is underway, enabling creation of the electronic "dossier" for each faculty member that can be routed electronically during the review process for merits, promotions, etc.

Course Information Reporting System (CIRS): The system that heretofore had been used to compile statistics on instruction (e.g. classroom utilization, courses taught by faculty, etc.) was a combination of FOCUS, MS Access, SAS scripts, etc. Beta testing is now underway on a web based system with an Oracle backend.

HR/AP Data Warehouse. Alpha testing is nearing completion on a web tool allowing ad hoc queries of HR/AP data contained in PPS. Also included within the application are various reports and a "dashboard" of FTE and headcounts by organization.

Student Information Data Warehouse. Phase II of The Student Information System Data Warehouse is in pilot testing. The system has been renamed the SIS Longitudinal Data Mart, and will allow cohort based queries and tracking of student progress over time. The Phase 2 software also includes many additional data elements and detail versus summary queries.

Student Mentoring / Advising Tool in Pilot. C&C has just introduced a new tool for faculty and staff involved with advising. This web application (Mentoring@UCR) is designed to give faculty and staff quick and easy access to current term enrollment, GPA (by term and cumulative), units earned, and degree audit options. The software also provides the capability to record and view notes from mentoring and advising sessions.

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Comprehensive On-line Hold System. This student self service web application is now in production and presents students all holds and resolutions in one location on GROWL (GROWL is the web application students utilize to access online enrollment, grades, etc.).

Transcript Request Payment System. Utilizing GROWL, students and graduates may request transcripts on line and pay fees via credit card.

Statement of Intent to Register. This student web self service application in now in production allowing applicants to SIR on GROWL and pay fees via credit card.

Direct Deposit Request. Students may now sign up / request on GROWL electronic funds transfer for student payments.

GROWL Messaging Service. Earlier this quarter, C&C deployed a new GROWL messaging service. This service allows up to 10 customized (to the student) messages to be displayed on login.

Deferred Payment Plan on GROWL. Within several weeks (the software is now in its final testing phases), students will be able to sign up for Deferred Payment Plan (DPP) via GROWL.

Summer Session Financial Aid Progress. Automated summer financial aid EFC (estimated financial contribution), Budgeting, and Packaging (driven by GROWL request for financial aid) is now in production.

Parental Pin Under Development. Specifications are now being written for a system allowing students to authorize GROWL "view access" to his/her data to third parties (e.g. parents, employers). Students will be able to assign customized access to various third parties as needed (e.g. students will be able to allow one person/group to view all GROWL screens, a second person/group to view account statements ONLY, etc.).

Other. Specifications are under development relating to new systems to better manage Satisfactory Academic Progress and for processing New Loan Borrower Information (PLUS) loans.

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Beowulf Cluster. The Beowulf Cluster for the High Energy/Heavy Ion Physics Group arrived from Western Scientific and is installed in the C&C Machine room. The cluster is compromised of 11 dual processors, dual core Opteron compute nodes, plus four master nodes each with a fiber-attached Apple Xserve 7TB RAID array.

The recruitment for a lead technologist in the Research Technology Group is underway, interviews are being conducted.

Department Firewalls. New hardware has been purchased and put into production that allows 1Gb interfaces on the C&C firewalls, available for-purchase by UCR departments and organizational units. These systems use laptop drives which tend to get hot and fail, so the firewall development team is producing a flash-based system that will not need disk drives. In addition, in order to reduce problems with network device spanning-tree problems, a routing-based firewall is being developed (the current firewall is bridging only).

Wireless Network. Work is underway to change our wireless network from a large flat VLAN with over 400 APs to a segmented one. This means significant change to our wireless authentication portal, and testing is nearing completion in our network lab. The system will be initially deployed in a limited environment (Computing and Communications staff). Further work will be required, once this initial phase is complete, to integrate encryption into the wireless infrastructure.

Systems Audit. The Technology Systems group is conducting an audit of their systems in order to improve their security and reliability. The review includes identification of current OS and application versions, current practices with regard to code development and maintenance, and current systems administration practices. The audit is underway with an initial set of Computing infrastructure systems (DNS and LDAP).

Enterprise Mail System. A new Mirapoint mail appliance has been purchased and installed. It uses a Network Appliance disk subsystem for its mail store, and has 6TB available for students, faculty and staff. With the increased space, student quotas will be raised to 250MB. Migration of student accounts from the old mail system to the new will begin this month. New versions of the Mirapoint OS will allow file system sizes of up to 4TB (formerly 850MB), so disk space issues will be greatly reduced. The old student Mirapoint mail appliance will be put into place as a disaster recovery mail system at a remote location. Plans are also underway to provide UCR alumni with an email account for life (via forwarding), which will take effect a year after graduation. This means students will be able to keep their UCR email address in perpetuity.

Virtual Web Site System. New multi-core CPU technology is being tested to provide a constrained multi-threaded environment for web sites. SPARC T1 CPUs are being used in a test environment in conjunction with Solaris containers to offer secure, fast virtual web sites on redundant, load-balanced hardware (SunFire T2000 systems). This same technology will be used to test key financial web application web services in the hopes of increasing performance.

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Participated in UCR Discovery Day Events. Student Computing Services (SCS) staff and student workers participated in several UCR Discovery Day events over the last quarter. These weekend events are held to give prospective UCR students an opportunity to learn more about UCR and what it has to offer to new students. The C&C booth featured demonstrations of the Clickers (audience response system) as well as cDigix and iLearn web presentations.

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Work Underway to Enable Central Authentication for iLearn. C&C has started work on enabling Central Authentication Services for iLearn, the campus Learning Management System. Doing so will allow students and faculty alike, to access iLearn using the same credentials they use for their campus e-mail accounts and many other central IT services (wireless, proxy, VPN, etc.).

iLearn (Blackboard) Upgrade Planning Underway. Beginning steps of a major upgrade to UCR's Blackboard Enterprise Learning Management Systems are being taken. The new version of BlackBoard features enhanced assessment tools and improved multi-language support.

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MSS Program Continues to Provide Effective Campus Wide Technology Support. The MSS (Microcomputer Support Specialist) program was conceived and implemented over 10 years ago to serve as a conduit between central IT support services and the individuals in colleges/departments who are responsible for front-line IT support. A general MSS meeting was held in the first week of April with the following agenda items: Sophos and SpySweeper update, IPX update, Extreme Googling, KST Sweetspots review, Apple/IBM/Lenova Reps and a UCRFS update.

Migration Assistance to Central E-mail and Calendaring. The Microcomputer Support Group provided support and guidance to several campus departments including the Chancellor's Office, the Executive Vice Chancellor, Housing and Dining Services, in migrating to C&C provided e-mail and calendaring services. Using centrally provided services not only decreases the overall cost to the University in providing those services, it also allows departmental-level IT personnel to concentrate more on specialized IT solutions.

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Technology Proposals for New UCR Buildings. The Multimedia Technology Group is completing technology proposals for 4 new buildings: College of Humanities I&R, Student Academic Support Services, Materials Science and Engineering, and Genomics. Also completed, is the technology design for a very unique lecture hall, Physics 2000. This special lecture hall will have the latest presentation technologies displayed on a three-projector system designed with new methods of instruction in mind.

Exploring the Intersection of Instructional Innovation, Physical Space, and Technology. The Multimedia Technology Group has designed three experimental classrooms that include specialized furniture, smart-boards and other media technologies. These mid-size rooms include whiteboards on every wall, and flexible furniture (to enable more interaction between students/instructor and students/students). The design also includes a dual data projection system with touch panel control.

Podcasting Coming to UCR. The Multimedia Technology Group, along with the Instructional Technology Group are researching and have begun testing solutions that will facilitate the digital recording and distribution of audio class content (known as Podcasting). Several different methods have been investigated and the chosen solution should be available for use by the end of the Spring 2006 quarter.

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Content Management Services. Computing and Communications has installed a Content Management System (CMS) by Vignette and is currently making edits on the software to make it user-friendlier. CVC has been working with the Systems to improve on the system before it gets deployed to the campus. When completed (estimated release - Summer 2006) the CMS will provide users within their departments to update content online by using a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor like Microsoft Word. Data resides on an Oracle database, which will allow multiple departments to share content. This same content will be able to be archived when it is no longer applicable to the site.

UNEX Registration System. CVC is developing an online registration program for University Extension within their current Q2 Student Information System. The program will enhance their current Q2 System to allow students to view courses offered, select them into a "shopping cart", and pay online via credit card. Information will then reside within their current system and allow users to print or access necessary data. CVC has currently released the catalog portion which is running live on the UNEX web site. The credit card portion is also complete and will work with C&C's SecurePay system. The Q2 system uses Oracle as its database which facilitates C&C in hosting the Internet Application Server (IAS).

Conference Management Application. C&C is developing a Conference Management Application for University Extension (UNEX), which will allow departments/campus entities to have conference attendees register and pay online. The program will capture basic profiles necessary to register individuals, and will have the ability to receive credit cards, FAU, and Purchase Order payments. UNEX or the Conference Contact can do all final processing and coordination of the conference.

Update on iGrade and iEval for Faculty. iEval and iGrade are becoming a part of a suite of faculty tools CVC has been programming. Over 10,000 grades have been submitted via iGrade for Winter Quarter (06). Please visit http://cnc.ucr.edu/igrade/index.php?content=usage for more statistics on usage. Also iEvals continues to be piloted while the Academic Senate struggles with various issues regarding participation.

Engineering Web/Print Marketing. CVC created a web and print marketing recruitment campaign for the Engineering Department that included a poster, invitations, web site and graphics to provide better branding of their products. The web site can be found at http://bournsid.ucr.edu and has been received well by the campus and the student community.

Career Center Store Front. C&C is developing an online storefront that will allow students to purchase services currently offered by the Career Center online. A student will be able to purchase such services as Career Counseling, Exploring and Applying to Graduate and Professional Schools, and various other services offered by them. The students will be able to pay via credit card connecting to our current Secure Pay online payment system. The list of services, cost and other details will be maintained via an administrative interface that is also being developed. The students will be able to print a receipt and walk into the Career Center to request the service that they purchased.

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VoIP Pilot Using NEC Phone Switch as Backbone. This summer Computing and Communications plans to implement an extensive VoIP pilot in the C&C building replacing all analog and digital service with one of the following types of VoIP solution; IP Phones, Digital phones with IP adaptors, softphones, gateway calls for analog devices and VoIP over wireless. We will be examining the quality of the VoIP service as well as the costs associated with each option.

Extension of rNet - UCR Network Extending into Riverside via City Dark Fiber. UCR plans to increase it use of Riverside City's dark fiber network to extend UCRs high speed data network to additional locations off campus. The California Museum of Photography and the Sweeney Art Gallery located in downtown Riverside should be connected to this network by the end of this summer.

City Wireless RFP in Progress. The City of Riverside has released an RFP to blanket all 86 square miles with wireless coverage to all 300,000 residents. The City is looking for a model that will provide free Internet services which will also provide Public Safety solution.

New Conferencing Services. Introduction of C&C's new teleconference service to the campus has gotten so many rave reviews we have recently doubled its capacity from 24 ports to 48 ports. This new service allows you to schedule your teleconferences in advance for meetings held 24x7. Conference participants call a bridge number and enter their assigned teleconference number to access their specific conference. An 800# is available for departments wanting to pay for off campus calls joining their conference.

Campus Auto Attendant Feature. Progress is being made in the planning and implementation of a speechattendant application for the campus. This application will allow callers to call the campus 7 days a week 24 hours around the clock and prompt callers to speak the name they are requesting. The application will either route the call or provide information to the caller.

Network Notes - Network Guidelines Update Underway - 10 GB Requirement Building to Core. Revisions to the Computing and Communications infrastructure planning document are currently underway. Revisions to the document will include the infrastructure requirements needed to bring a 10 GB uplink to those buildings with more that 250 active users and prepare remaining buildings for 10 GB.

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