Message From Our New Vice President for Information Technology

It is exciting to move to a new career opportunity. It is even more exciting when that opportunity is with a great institution like Miami University. I am pleased to join the team here at Miami as the institution's first vice president for information technology. We have some interesting challenges facing us as an institution between now and our bicentennial year of 2009. My expectations are that, along with the rest of our institution, information technology services will be instrumental in making Miami "First in 2009."

Buy Your Microsoft Software Now!

Our current Microsoft contract will expire on September 30, 2003. While we expect to sign a new contract, prices for Microsoft software will be substantially higher after September 30, 2003.

Gartner Research

Examples of new Gartner research articles are available from Miami's web site to all Miami students, faculty, and staff, and are listed below. You will be prompted to login using your UniqueID and MUnet password.

Gartner research will be of particular interest to any student, faculty, or staff member learning, teaching or using technology. Areas of focus for Gartner research include E-Learning, Business Management of IT, Security and Privacy, Higher Education, and Emerging Trends and Technology. The web site is updated weekly by Friday with new research articles.

Miami ID Card Gets a New Look This Summer

For privacy reasons, the university has moved away from using social security numbers to identify Miami faculty, staff and students. Instead, the university is converting to new ID cards that use Banner IDs. This change requires new ID cards for all faculty and staff members, as well as students. These ID cards will present a new look that you may preview at www.muohio.edu/IDCard.

New TV Programming for Campus

Miami University has awarded a new contract to Dish Network to provide programming for the MUnet campus television system beginning on July 1. Six hundred students living in campus housing were recently surveyed about their television viewing habits. The results of that survey, along with budgetary considerations, allowed us to make adjustments to the programming lineup.

NOC Reports Number of Unplanned Outages Down

Technical Services' Network Operations Center reports outages soon after they are detected for MCIS production services. Some of these services include:

• servers
• network equipment
• Novell printer support
• Blackboard
• e-mail
• Internet and other network outages

Print Center Update

You may be interested in two new additions to technology at the Print Center:

• Xerox Docutech 6135
• Miami U-Print

Slammer Worm Burrows at Miami University

On Saturday morning, January 25, a malicious computer program called Slammer attacked computer systems worldwide. The program exploited an exposure in Microsoft's SQL database software. After installing itself on a vulnerable server, it sent copies of itself to other servers, where it installed and repeated the process in a continuing loop. A program that behaves like this is called a worm. It caused many servers to crash and the general Internet to slow to a crawl. In fact it caused such havoc that it was widely reported in the Sunday newspapers the next day.

Planned Spring Break Outages

MCIS wants to thank all our clients who patiently endured some inconvenience from outages during Spring Break this year. Three significant accomplishments were planned and realized for Spring Break week.

Summer Blackboard Upgrade

On Tuesday, May 13, MCIS will be upgrading Blackboard from version 5.0.2 to 6.0.7. Faculty currently using Blackboard have received an e-mail detailing the new features. In addition, we will also be moving Blackboard to two newer and more powerful servers. These should make using Blackboard faster and allow more people to use it concurrently.

Summer-Time Computing: Using Miami Accounts While Away From Campus

With many of you leaving campus over the summer, we have a few technology tips that should make your time away from campus easier.

For an overview of using your accounts while off-campus, please see the 'Using your Miami accounts while away from campus' Knowledge Base case.

Top Picks From the Knowledge Base

Curious what the current hot technology questions/topics are on campus? Knowledge Base traffic provides a great clue. Following are some of the most frequently viewed categories and Knowledge Base cases over the past semester:

Training Notes

One of the best kept secrets, that we don't want to keep, is that we have free computer-based training available to faculty, staff and students at Miami University. Please forgive our repetition of this fact here in TechTalk, and, if you haven't checked out the new MCIS Training page, please have a look. The page gives access to:

• several types of online training links (including PC and Macintosh computer based training)
• information about training and workshops all over campus
• the TRAIN registration system.