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Campus Computing NewsBy Dr. Maurice Leatherbury, Senior Director of Academic ComputingUNT System Acquires Campus-wide Oracle Database LicenseAt a special meeting of the UNT Board of Trustees on Thursday, June 14th, the Board approved the purchase of an Oracle Database Enterprise Edition license along with some database development tools, data warehousing tools, and customer relationship management tools. The license gives any of the UNT system component institutions (currently UNT in Denton, the Health Sciences Center in Fort Worth, and the System Center in Dallas) the right to install the Oracle DBMS on an unlimited number of servers on their campuses and to grant Internet access to an unlimited number of users to the programs licensed under the contract. UNT chose the Oracle database management system as the foundation for a future enterprise information system (EIS) because it is widely considered to be the preeminent large system DBMS available today. All of the leading contenders that UNT is considering for the EIS operate under Oracle and by purchasing the foundation tools today the university is preparing itself to have the infrastructure in place to implement the EIS applications (human resources system, financial system, student records system, etc.) when those applications are selected. The first uses of the Oracle DBMS and tools that have been purchased will be to develop a data warehouse application and to support UNT's development partnership with Oracle for an advanced student recruitment package. The data warehouse will entail extracting historical data from the current mainframe system, making the data available to authorized persons over the Web, and updating the data on a regular basis to support ongoing university operations. For example, one Web report might give financial account holders the ability to view the previous day's transactions against their accounts. The customer relationship management (CRM) tools that were purchased underlie the effort that UNT hopes will eventually replace the current Wang system that manages our undergraduate admissions prospecting and recruitment materials distribution system (i.e., mails out information pieces to prospective students.) If the CRM application works as planned, it will enable UNT to communicate electronically, either via e-mail or fax, to students who inquire about programs here. It will also manage "campaigns" such as the capital campaign or a summer recruitment campaign. UNT, along with half a dozen other universities and colleges, is working with Oracle developers to develop templates for such applications in the higher education market. Coy Hoggard, Senior Director of Administrative Computing, and Joneel Harris, Interim Associate Vice President for Enrollment Management, are the co-project leaders for the enterprise information system. The next step in the selection process of the EIS is the release of an RFP to potential vendors: it's expected that that will occur within the next two months. An extensive review of the responses will follow the RFP, with site visits to current customer colleges and universities possibly part of the evaluation process. Microsoft Campus Agreement To Be RenewedWe're in the process of renewing the Microsoft Campus Agreement, the contract that allows UNT Denton and System Center departments to install several Microsoft software products on any machine on campus without having to pay per-machine fees. Microsoft recently announced a revision of the Campus Agreement that will affect UNT next year, but we're able to renew the old version of the license this year. Next year's version is likely to cost us significantly more than this renewals and removes home distribution of Microsoft operating systems (Windows ME and Windows 2000, for example) options from the contract. We'll provide more information next year when it's time to renew the Campus Agreement again. Any UNT employee (not Health Sciences Center employees, unfortunately) can purchase the products covered under the Agreement in the bookstore for $7.00 per CD. The products currently covered are:
The license specifically states that employees can install these products on their home machine or laptop for use in conducting university work. Employees who leave UNT must remove any product purchased under the Campus Agreement from their home computer and destroy the CD's used to install the software. In the past two years that the Campus Agreement has been in effect, 1,362 UNT employees have purchased 2,341 products under the agreement. Windows 98 upgrade, Office 2000, FrontPage 2000, and (surprisingly) Visual Studio 4.0 have been the most popular products.
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