Campus Computing News

By Dr. Maurice Leatherbury, 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.

Administrative Mainframe to Get an Operating System Upgrade

Editor's Note: 5/21/98 -- Due to unforeseen circumstances, the upgrade described below has been put on hold. It will take place at a later date, probably in August. We will let you know when a new date is set. In the meantime, an upgrade to the Academic MVS operating system is planned. Click here to read about the details.

The Administrative partition of the IBM 9672/R24 mainframe will receive an operating system upgrade on the weekend of May 23-24, 1998. The upgrade will be from MVS/ESA to IBM's OS/390 ( a newer version of MVS). During the upgrade, the Administrative mainframe will be generally unavailable. The Academic mainframe systems (VM/CMS and MVS/ESA) will not be affected by the upgrade activity with the exception that printing to the IBM 3900 in ISB 133 will not be available. For more information about the Administrative mainframe upgrade, contact Coy Hoggard, Director of Administrative information Systems.

Dallas Education Center Computer Lab

The University has equipped a general access computer lab at the Dallas Education Center (DEC).* It is primarily for the use of DEC students, but is also available to any UNT student who presents a valid UNT ID. DEC currently houses 20 Pentium computers that, by the end of May, will be connected to the University and the Internet. This connection will be accomplished through a T1 line that is shared with the videoconferencing facility that UNT has installed at the downtown Dallas site.

The DEC lab is open Monday through Thursday from 4:00 to 10:45 p.m., Friday from 4:00 to 7:45 p.m., and Saturday from 8:00 a.m. to 5:45 p.m.. The lab increases the number of general access computers available to students at UNT to about 670, maintaining our lead in the ratio of computers to students among Texas' largest public universities.** If you have any questions about the lab, please contact Wil Clark, ACS General Access Lab Manager (940-565-4808).

Our Campus Web Administrator is a Published Author

Mark Wilcox, Campus Web Administrator and Academic Computing Services staff member, has contributed an article to Netscape's "Viewsource" online journal. The article, entitled "Accessing LDAP from Server-Side JavaScript," details the programming that Mark did to provide user authentication to our central Web server. That authentication is particularly important now that we're delivering paid courses over the Web: only authorized students can get to the course materials. In the article, Mark shows other Netscape Enterprise Server managers how to integrate Lightweight Directory Access Protocol services into the Netscape server's access mechanisms.

Academic Computing Services Named Outstanding Department

Academic Computing Services will be recognized as one of the outstanding departments at the University this month. The recognition of ACS will take place at Dr. Hurley's Staff Sack Lunch on Thursday, May 14th from 12:00 to 1:00 p.m. in the Silver Eagle Suite A. If you have ever called the Helpdesk, gotten a UNT Internet account, taken a Computing Center short course, set up a home page on people.unt.edu, received help in analyzing your research data using SAS or SPSS, or read this article, you have reaped the benefits of having Academic Computing Services on campus. For a complete list of ACS staff and their areas of responsibility see http://www.unt.edu/ACS/table.htm.

Computer-based Training for MS Office, Windows 95, and Windows NT Available in Bookstore

Students, faculty, and staff now have interactive computer-based courseware available on CD-ROM's for the most popular desktop applications. The UNT Bookstore is now selling CD-ROMs with CBT Systems courseware for Microsoft Office 97, Windows 95, and Windows NT workstation. Under an agreement that the University recently made with CBT Systems, UNT creates the CD's and sells them for $10 each to recover the cost of duplication and some of the licensing costs of the courseware. Two additional CDs, one with IntranetWare 4.11 administration courses and one with Windows NT administration courses will soon be available at $15 each. Details can be found at the following URL: http://www.unt.edu/nms/cbt/cd_sales.htm.

Remedy Call Tracking System Available Soon

Computer support personnel across campus will soon be using the Remedy call tracking system to keep track of "trouble tickets" on problems that users report. The Remedy system will provide a means to track reported problems, share solutions to problems among support personnel, and "escalate" problems automatically when they are unresolved after a set period. Ultimately, end-users of campus computers, using a standard Web browser, will be able to submit their own problem reports on the Web and then determine the status of their problem's resolution. Remedy is one of the leaders in call tracking software and the package was selected by computing support personnel after an extensive study of available systems.

Web Course Management System Evaluation Proceeding Apace

As reported in last month's Benchmarks Online, a group of interested faculty and staff are evaluating Web course management systems and have met twice in the past month to discuss the products under review.  Two packages, TopClass and WebCT have been installed on the University's central Web server and are the leading candidates at this time. Both packages provide a structure for holding Web courseware and have facilities for tracking student progress, administering and scoring tests, exchanging E-mail, and holding online conferences among students. The goal of the evaluation group is to select a system by the end of May and have it up and running, with documentation and training, before the beginning of the fall semester. Contact Maurice Leatherbury if you'd like additional information about these systems or if you'd like to participate in the evaluation.

Microsoft Office 98 for the Macintosh Delayed at UNT

Microsoft Office 98 for the Macintosh, which includes the popular Word, Excel, and PowerPoint applications, won't be available under UNT's Microsoft Select agreement until mid-May at the earliest.  Microsoft did not include the product in the latest Select agreement CD-ROM's that we received. Our license under the Select agreement prevents us from performing multiple installations on campus machines from a locally-purchased copy of Office 98. Of course, you can still purchase Office 98 at the Campus bookstore or elsewhere and install it on your machine, but you won't be able to get our inexpensive version until our next shipment of Select disks (which we hope will include Office 98!). We expect our next shipment around the middle of May.

Incidentally, for the Windows users of the MS Office suite among you, the latest projections about the availability of Office 98 for Windows is around the first quarter of next year.n

* The Dallas Education Center is located at 1901 Main St. in Dallas (214-744-6600).

** ZD-Net (publisher of PCWeek, MacWeek, etc.) has published a listing of the top 100 "most wired" colleges and universities in the U.S. and UNT ranked 92 out of 100. We believe that our ranking should be higher because ZD-Net didn't have a completely accurate count of computers available on campus. Nevertheless, we are happy to be recognized by a national publication such as ZD-Net for our efforts in this regard.