The following are my notes taken at the conference, in no particular
order.
This may be of interest to the Remedy Team, Tony, Harold, Jim Dunsdon.
George Washington University (their building in on the $10 bill) gave a session on their student resident “problem recording and tracking” system. Exclusive Remedy/Web/special projects design Group. 18 staff. Web interface – Coldfusion (reads Remedy and provides a better Web interface). 35 Residence Halls in two campuses. 6,500 beds, 17,000 request for repair each year. Systems supports Facilities Management, Property Management, contract companies. Cost efficiencies. Students submit service requests via web portal 24 x 7 (and really like the service) and can rate the quality of the follow-up service. Severity/urgency/phone escalation possible. Interfaces to LDAP (authentication/login), Banner (user data), Oracle. Feeds Facilities Management work order system (Oracle). The outside contractors have limited access to the system for bidding (generating cost savings). The end results were happier students and lower operational costs. They have one Remedy developer.
In a follow-up discussion with Fred, interest was expressed in the remedy work we are doing at the University of Calgary and my open source application concept, and that a constituent group should be created (and possible and equivalent for RUG).
Contacts: Francesco de Leo, Director, Web Applications; Fred Gillis, Manager, Program Development for Applications
Action Items:
Poster Session – Internal Outsourcing - University of Virginia.
This may be of interest to Morven Wilson, Harold, Tony, Don.
They are running a cost recovery team very similar in terms of goals,
mandate, magnitude, cash flow and success to that that exists on the GIS
team and GIS Remedy team. They are also Remedy users and are very
interested in our collaboration open source model with the University of
Victoria
Action Items:
Birds of a Feather Sessions
Innovative Uses of Remedy in Higher Education
I attempted to hold a session entitled “Innovative Uses of Remedy in Higher Education” . This session, along with a few others, were cancelled due to lack of interest. I found the location of the posting/sign-up board difficult to find and that may have something to do with the lack of interest (may session 2 years ago was well attended).
Closing the Relationship Between Faculty and IT
This may be of interest to Harold, Tony, Morven.
I attended a session on bringing faculty closer to IT – hosted by David
Stack, Deputy Chief Information Offices, University of Wisconsin and Roger
Bielefeld, Director, Research Computing, Case Western Reserve University.
They had never heard of central IT creating an administrative application
for a research project (David Irvine Halliday and Light Up The World) and
were quite intrigued.
I then followed up with Richard Katz, Vice president, Educause. ECAR
is commencing a study on the relationship between Administration and Faculty
and he was really interested our support of LUTW project. He thought it
to be unique as well and will think of it in terms of the ECAR study
(questions in the study are yet to be created).
Action Item: Send copy of Remedy
articles to David Stack (david@uwm.edu), Roger (bielefeld@cwru.edu) and
Richard (rkatz@educause.edu).
Universal Design
This may be of interest to Tony, Harold, Morven, Jeremy, Gordon
I attended several sessions on Universal Design which promotes the use of standards in Web page design to create Web applications for multi-platform support (PC, PDA, Phone, older environments, noisy and noiseless environments) and by disabled audience (deaf, blind, non-keyboard access, ESL). Much of this is a response to various legislated directions from Federal and State governments.
Question. Do we have similar legislation in Canada ? Are we fulfilling the mandate ?
Poster Session (see "Universal Design" above)
This is very much interest to Jim and Shannon. Harold, Tony, Morven, Gord and Don may be interested.
I attended a Poster Session Booth and a conference session by Terry Thompson, Senior Computer Specialist, The University of Washington. His role is to provide a response to numerous layers of legislation, and provide information to his peers (his is sponsored by a grant). He mentioned several alternatives to address carpel tunnel issue for software developers and an interesting device, a refreshable Braille display. I believe the program is named “DO-IT”. Other resources include the National Center on Accessaible Electronic and Information Technology in Education (AccessIT), the Education National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation research, www.washington.edu/accessit and www.adata.org.
Action Items.
Poster Session - Howard Strauss
Howard Strauss gave an as usual, interactive, humorous and informative session on how search engines work. His slides are located at:
http://www.princeton.edu/~howard/slides/search.htm
Security and IT
This may be of interest to Harold, Tony.
There was a session entitled “Card Access and IT: The Perfect Marriage” by Gary Bernstein, Director, Network and Communications Services, McGill University on the topic of access control and video surveillance being 90% software and being needed to reside in the IT domain as a core technology, a concept that McGill has implemented.
I also attended a booth demonstration of IBM technology which under a specific condition, for example, the third successive failure of a card reader, a photo is taken and stored on a web site. A security officer can access the photo and compare it to existing retained photos from a central database to ensure the access is legitimate.
Gartner Group – Annual Higher Education Update Session
This may be of interest to Harold, Tony, Morven
As always at EDUCAUSE, Michael Zastrocky (Vice President and Research Director/Academic Strategies, Gartner Group) gave a summary of where technology is headed and the unique requirements for Higher Education. The demographic challenge was particularly highlighted and the need to be proactive – today. Especially with succession planning.
Details too numerous to mention – slides are on the way. I did noticed that Michael polled the audience of those that have been effected by personal ID theft and I would estimate 5%-10% raised their hands. He mentioned that currently only 3% of ID theft crimes lead to arrests.
Action Item: Distribute Michael’s slides when they are received to Harold and others whom are interested.