WiFi may be slower than a wired network, but you can't beat the convenience.  As more and more students faculty and staff make extensive use of campus WiFi access, the pressure has grown to make it available everywhere. So, last spring ITS received approval to move ahead with a plan to implement a campus-wide enterprise wireless system over the course of academic year 2009-10.  The first fruits of that project are already installed in Miller dorm, and by mid-September ITS plans to have coverage in the entire KMY complex, the Union Building and Westlawn.  Other residence halls will come online during fall semester.  We'll post additional status reports as we make progress on the implementation

In an effort to make emergency notification more effective, GC has purchased and implemented e2campus, a leader in higher ed emergency notification systems.  e2campus provides campus leaders with a single dashboard for pushing emergency and crisis-related messages out to campus through email, SMS, and desktop clients. Along with the new siren system, this multi-tier approach helps ensure that effective communication occurs in the midst of a campus emergency.

Last year at this time, clerical staff across campus began entering course schedule information into Oracle Calendar. This year that task is automated.  Thanks to the efforts of Paul Ortman, Ryan Rittenhouse, the Registrar's Office and others, course schedules in Jenzabar are getting pushed into Zimbra Calendar for rooms, students and faculty members.  The implications of this go beyond labor savings on data entry.  The information is more accurate, and facilitates scheduling of rooms and people across campus.  Enjoy!

 

Some things take longer than you think.  Nearly 5 years in the making, Goshen's iLight connection finally went live on July 29.  The iLight network is Indiana's award-winning statewide fiber-optic network, which connects an increasing number of hoosier colleges and universities.  Practically what it means is that we have 20 times the network capacity for instate and internet 2 traffic and 60 Mbits of commodity internet bandwidth.  Many popular internet sites, like YouTube, FaceBook, Google and Yahoo are already on Internet 2, which means we have effectively eliminated our internet connection as a bottleneck--forever.  Happy downloading!

After months of preparation, GC is now live on Zimbra, the popular e-mail/collaboration suite used by Stanford, Carleton College, University of Indianapolis, Comcast and hundreds of other schools.  Zimbra mimics Microsoft Exchange, which simplifies connecting mobile devices and its calendar offers suitable functionality for replacing Oracle Calendar while adding improved support for internet calendar standards.  Also significant, students will have personal calendar accounts and everyone will have their accounts automatically populated with their academic schedule.  This simplifies scheduling meetings since even people who don't use their calendar on regular basis will have their class schedules available.  

Tip:  Vertical selection in MS Word

In Microsoft Word you can select a column of text (a vertical selection) by holding down the Control-key (Windows) and clicking and dragging.  This can be a huge timesaver when editing columnar data.