By Mark Wilcox, Campus Web Administrator
Three Nifty Things
By the time you are reading this three nifty things have (or at least they should have :) happened:
- We unveiled the new (hopefully improved) central
UNT Website at http://www.unt.edu/.
PAIS and Central Web Support worked really hard
at improving the design of this site. We have so
much content (and EVERYONE wants to be on
the homepage :) it's hard to keep it all
organized. Hopefully we've done a better job at
organization. Things like the site map and the
most often searched links will help when you
can't find what you are looking for. I really
want to extend my thanks to Sharon Marek and Kenn
Moffitt on my staff as well as to Mark Lansdon
and Dianna Bracken in PAIS for putting in most of
the blood, sweat and tears on this project. As
usual if you have any comments send them to www@unt.edu .
- In conjunction with the new site, we've also
upgraded to new server hardware. We have more
than doubled our capacity on our physical
hardware. For you tech junkies out there we are
now on dual Sun E-450s with dual 250 MHZ CPU
(that's 2 CPUs per machine), 1 GB of RAM (yes
that's 1 GB of RAM per machine), 50 GB of
diskspace, and 5 100 MBT ethernet jacks running
Solaris 2.6. They also have built-in growth room.
One machine will primarily be tasked for WebCT
and as an LDAP server while the other will
primarily serve our standard central Web servers.
- WebCT will be in use in a big way. Too say that WebCT has grown beyond everyone's expectations is to make an understatement. In less than 4 months we had over 100 classes in production. It is now the only product we support for the delivery of Web-based classes. If you have any questions, see the Center for Distributed Learning Website at http://www.unt.edu/cdl/.
One Big Project
The biggest project on-tap for this semester is to work seriously on putting in place a system for generating a standard electronic userid. This means that you will only need one userid for getting access to E-mail, the Web, the campus network and electronic class information. As part of this, we will likely be able to deploy a Web-based directory system. The main reason why we don't yet have this is to protect your privacy. I do not want to risk publishing personal information until we know that our information is reliable, easily updateable and protectable. Stay tuned . . .
Until next time.
Mark