Campus Computing News

By Dr. Maurice Leatherbury, Senior Director of Academic Computing

Microsoft Campus Agreement Really is Coming Soon

Back in May, I wrote that software products under the Microsoft Campus Agreement should soon be available on campus. Although it's taken much longer to finalize the details of the agreement, we're hopeful that we'll be able to start installing the software within the next two weeks (by the end of July, at least.)  To reiterate what is covered under the campus agreement, here's the list:

• Microsoft desktop operating system upgrades (Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT 4.x, Windows 2000, etc.)

• Office Professional (including Office 2000.) This package includes Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Access.

• FrontPage (including FrontPage 2000).

• Visual Studio Professional. This package includes development software such as Visual Basic, Visual C++, and Visual Interdev.

• BackOffice Server Client Access Licenses. This is necessary if you're using Windows NT servers.

• MS Press Office Starts Here Step-by-Step Interactive. This is a CD-rom tutorial package on Office.

• Macintosh versions of Office and FrontPage are covered under the Campus Agreement as well.

Faculty and staff will have the right to run one copy of each of the software package, for school related activities, on either a laptop or desktop that they own or lease. Tentatively, the vendor of our Campus Agreement will make copies for sale in the Bookstore for a fee of $6.50 per CD (Office 2000, for example, comes on two CD's, so your cost would be $13 for that product that normally costs $200 to academic users.) It will probably take about two months to work out all the details of bookstore sales and tracking of faculty and staff purchases, so don't expect to be able to buy the software as soon as the agreement is finally signed.

Your network manager should be able to answer questions about the Campus Agreement (and as of this writing they're waiting to hear from us that all the details of the agreement have been finalized.)

Discussions with the Alliance for Higher Education about an Internet 2 GigaPOP

UNT is an Internet 2 member, meaning that we belong to the organization (UCAID) that administers that high-speed academic network. However, our campus is not yet connected to the actual Internet 2 data communications network: the cost of connection is quite high and our proposal to the NSF for funding a major portion of the cost wasn't successful on our first try in January, 1999.

We have been meeting with a group of north Texas universities, under the aegis of the Alliance for Higher Education (AHE), to discuss the formation of a gigaPOP (gigabit Point of Presence) to pool the data connections of regional universities and share the costs of Internet 2 connectivity. For the past two months, Bill Buntain, Director of Networking and Communications Services, has met periodically with representatives from AHE, SMU, TCU, UTD, UTA, TAMU Commerce, and UT Southwestern to work out the details of the technical, administrative, and financial issues of such a gigaPOP. While we are still far from completing the design of the proposed system, we are encouraged at this point by the cost savings potential of a north Texas gigaPOP. We still have to find funding for the connection, which could easily exceed $200,000/year for the gigaPOP. Dr. Mark Rorvig is revising our application for resubmission to NSF for a Connections Grant which, if funded, would provide up to $350,000 for two years. If you have any applications that require high-speed Internet 2 connectivity, be sure to let Dr. Rorvig know so they can be included in the proposal.