Campus Computing News

By Dr. Maurice Leatherbury, Senior Director of Academic Computing

Once again, there is lots of news to report on the computing front here at UNT. Benchmarks Online readers may be particularly interested in the following items.

Telecommunications Merged with the Computing Center

On June 1, the campus Telecommunications department became a part of the Computing Center. This merger brings together the services of voice communications and data communications and simplifies our interfaces with the phone company and other telecommunications providers. Because voice and data increasingly travel over the same wire, campus wiring projects now almost always involve both phone and computer connections, and our negotiations with the phone company are as much about T1 lines as "POTS" (plain old telephone service), it seemed that the time had come to merge the two forms of communications services into a single organization.

Most of Telecommunications will fall under the Networking and Microcomputer Services division of the Computing Center and you'll still use the same phone number to order telecomm services as in the past. The Campus Information Operators will be managed by the head of the Help Desk department in the Computing Center.

The Claims Accounting Department has assumed responsibility for interdepartmental transfers to all departments for charges associated with telephone lines, calling cards, pagers and cellular phones. All questions regarding departmental charges, and requests for corrections (including account number changes), should be directed to that office (EXT. 3202 or EXT. 2028). Interdepartmental transfers for work orders, and associated corrections, will remain the responsibility of the Telecommunications Department.

Web Course Management System Selected

After involving a number of faculty members in evaluating Web-based course management systems and getting feedback from them on several such systems, we have chosen WebCT as the system that the Computing Center will be supporting. We have purchased a single-server, unlimited user license for WebCT to run on our central UNIX Web server and although WebCT is available for use immediately by faculty who want to start using the product for course delivery and management, we won't be fully ramped up to support it with training and documentation until late Summer at the earliest.  Any faculty member can develop courses using WebCT free of charge: contact Mark Wilcox at mewilcox@unt.edu or at EXT. 2568 if you'd like to be an "early adopter" of this package on campus.

Plans for Acquiring Redundant Web Servers

As the UNT campus becomes even more dependent upon its central Web server for the delivery of information about the campus, our services, and most importantly, actual coursework, the need for a highly reliable Web server becomes critical. Our current central Web server, a Sun Netra machine, has been trouble-free since we purchased it nearly two years ago, but it may not be capable of supporting a growing workload and we don't have a machine available that could take over immediately if it should fail. Plans are under way, therefore, to purchase redundant servers with a 'failover' capability so that if one machine should crash, another would take up the load and thus would not interrupt Web services. We've almost completed our study of the most cost-effective means of providing such redundancy and hope to have the new systems in place by early Fall.

UNT Named as One of America's 100 Most Wired Colleges

Yahoo! Internet Life, the online magazine, has named UNT as one of America's 100 most wired colleges based on a survey that the magazine conducted of more than 400 schools across the country.  Twenty-two factors of computer services available on campus were measured by Yahoo!, including student E-Mail accounts, access to online library catalogs, online course registration, Web course materials, and Web policies regarding student use of computers.  The magazine, in notifying us of the award, said:

As today's college students move toward the 21st century, they will become increasingly technology-savvy and will become part of the record growth and change in Web use. Your school has adapted to the needs of these future leaders, and for that, we congratulate you.

Academic Mainframe Operating System Upgraded

The difficult task of upgrading the academic mainframe's MVS/ESA system to OS/390, the latest version of MVS, took place from June 1 through June 5th. During the upgrade, some services such as mainframe printing from the academic side of the mainframe were unavailable. Almost all services are now restored and we're in good shape to make it though the Year 2000, the major reason for the upgrade.n