By Mark Wilcox, Campus Web Administrator

The next 6 months . . .

What can you expect from your Central Web Support team in the next 6 months? A lot, I hope. If we do it right, you won't even know that we did it, but below are some hints as to what we have in the works.

A standard ID and password scheme for restricted access Web sites

First we have begun to implement a standard ID and password scheme for restricted access Web sites. The current scheme uses your UNT ID number as your User-ID and your capital first letter of your last name plus the last four digits of your UNT ID as your password. The system is now being used by the UNT Libraries to protect some of their CD-ROMs. This isn't meant to inconvenience you, but instead to actually help you. Some of the software we have can only be used by UNT clients. It is too limiting to just say that anyone from a UNT network can use the system because many of you access our site from third party ISPs. Instead of forcing you to use us as your ISP, we enable you to choose whomever you want, and still you can "get to the library." This system, hopefully, will be stable and will start to be accepted as a standard around campus Web sites that need the same kind of service.

Distance Learning

As you may have heard, we are now really promoting distance learning over the Internet. To help in that regard, we will be installing a packaged system that will make it -- we hope -- easier for everyone involved to participate. The system shouldn't limit the professor in terms of the types of content that they want to place on-line but will instead help by allowing students to participate with a standard interface. Some of the options available will be student tracking (so you can see when Johnny came to class), homework uploading, note taking that is stored on-line (and protected) and on-line chat rooms for class discussion.

Updated software and hardware

We hope to unveil two updated systems as well. We have purchased Allaire Forums to use as a replacement for our aging Web Conferencing System. Forums is a type of software that enables you to post messages to a discussion group with only a Web browser. Forums allows restricted access, HTML tagging, searching and E-mail notification. The other update we intend is to upgrade our search engine to the Netscape Compass server, which is highly regarded in the Internet trade press.

Finally, last but not least, we hope to upgrade our server to a much more powerful machine which should improve the performance of the central UNT servers.

Until next time.

Mark