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April 5-6, 2004

UW-Eau Claire

Plenary Session

Welcome
Infrastructure for the University of Wisconsin
Discussion of Networking Initiatives

ITMC Breakout Session

Learn@UW Update
APBS Update
IAA Update
Introduction of Procurement Director
ADL Academic Co-Lab Initiative
Common System Interoperability Architecture Working Group

Joint Session of the ITMC and CWCW

Understanding Web Standards

ITMC Breakout Session

Electronic Portfolios at UW-Eau Claire
Institution Roundtable
Video over IP
Report from the Help Desk Breakout Group
Report from the CWCW Breakout Group
Next ITMC Conference

Plenary Session with Help Desk group and CWCW

Welcome - Donald Mash, UW-Eau Claire Chancellor

Technology is key to students' intellectual and personal development, both inside and outside the classroom. Technology should be integrated into learning, and not merely added on. We are facing both technical and fiscal challenges. At the UW System level, efforts are undeway to communicate to state leaders and the public the importance of investing in the UW System. We're all endeavoring to demonstrate how our efforts benefit the entire state, not just our students. Too often, there is a sense that the mere application of technology will solve financial problems, without planning for the costs of technology.

Infrastructure for the University of Wisconsin - Ed Meachen, Annie Stunden & Kathy Pletcher

Ed Meachen, Annie Stunden and Kathy Pletcher reprised a presentation that was given to the Board of Regents on March 4, 2004 regarding technology infrastructural issues. The Board is trying to grasp the "university of the future" in light of potential budget reductions. The presentation had three parts:

1. A video featuring UWS students and faculty using technology
2. Annie Stunden addressing networking, middleware and portals
3. Kathy Pletcher focussing on key applications

Annie Stunden reported that the video impressed the Regents with how technology is transforming education. However, it is important, that people see not only the flashy applications, but also the infrastructure behind it: the underware, middleware and outerware.

The network "underware" is the very base of the UWS technology environment. Each campus has its own set of computers and operating systems connected to its campus backbone. The campus networks interconnect through WiscNet, and from there to the commodity Internet and research networks worldwide. In addition to the UWS, WiscNet connects technical colleges, many libraries, public health services and 380 K-12 school districts. Within the UWS, WiscNet empowers one shared course management system, one shared financial management system and, soon, one shared human resources system. Working with colleagues in other northern states, a "Northern Tier" network for education and research is being designed to run between the major hubs in Chicago and Seattle.

Middleware consists of key technology services, such as IAA, security, data warehousing and report management. In the past, each application provided its own self-contained environment. Today, that model doesn't work. Middleware allows all of the campus outerware applications to build off of one central set of services. A key feature is the central Identification, Authentication and Authorization (IAA) service, which is somewhat like a credit card that allows a person to access only their own "accounts" and services. The first IAA-empowered application is Learn@UW, which provides the Desire2Learn course management system.

Another key middleware component is the continually evolving data warehouse. Currently the data warehouse contains primarily financial information, but payroll and human resources information data will be added.

The portal cuts through the enterprise from beyond the UWS outerware, to the underware and back out again. It enables a person to take advantage of all of the layers in a convenient fashion, e.g., access a course website, check on a tuition bill, connect with an advisor, etc. This is a smart environment, but it's not easy to build. It's a little difficult to understand, and it can't be built without a budget. Beyond the outerware layer are things like help desks, computer labs and a plethora of other services.

Kathy Pletcher described a February Board of Regents presentation by Alan Guskin, who challenges every institution to audit their technology infrastructure and its ability to transform the enterprise. In 2002, 95% of the UWS faculty were using technology to prepare for teaching and 45% were using courseware in their teaching. The CIO Council began to discuss adopting a utility model for providing course management services, e.g., decentralized course development with centralized computing support. After a year long study, the task force recommended migrating to a single product managed by a single utility. The UWS is about 2/3 of the way through the migration process. In Fall 2004, 6,801 classses with 158,916 students had online components, more than a four-fold increase in courses and almost a 10 fold increase in students since Fall 1999.

The Learn@UW utility is located on the UW-Madison campus and supports the campus Learning Technology Centers. The UW System is leading the nation in this redesign. By standarizing on a single platform, faculty can develop learning modules, place them in a central library, and work together in teams to generate courses.

Al Guskin also talked about libraries as transformative change agents for the academy. Twenty-five years ago, libraries were already building online catalogs. Now they are focussed on digitizing collections to build an infrastructure for self-directed learning. They still offer traditional services, but have also created an intellectual commons in collaboration with the IT staff on their campuses.

Ed Meachen outlined the challenges for moving forward:

1. Protecting resources from further state cuts. Technology is not static and has been funded largely through reallocation.
2. Recognize the impacts that technology developments have on faculty and staff. Resources for faculty development are more difficult to find than resources for the technology itself
3. Developing the infrastructure in a collaborative fashion. There are insufficient resources available for replicating functions.
4. Clarifying to the state that the university's use of technology for teaching and research is different than how the state uses technology to administer programs

Copies of the video have been distributed to the CIOs and published on the http://www.wisconsin.edu website. The Regents plan to bring four budget items to the legislature, including technology and libraries.

Discussion of Networking Initiatives

Annie Stunden reported that higher education changed the world with the Internet, then commercial traffic started running on it. Higher education then built out Internet 2, which has a couple hundred members, primarily Research 1 and Research 2 universities. "SEGP" relationships were then set up to extend Internet 2 connectivity to additional partners. This is how WiscNet members gain connectivity to Internet 2 members through UW-Madison and UW-Milwaukee. The Internet 2 physical network is known as Abilene and runs at 10Gbps. Recently, Internet 2 has been used to share a lot music and media files. The member institutions are working to constrain their own traffic as appropriate.

There are no Abilene connections across the northern section of the country between Chicago and Seattle. The next major research network initiative is National Lambda Rail, which is based upon allocating dedicated "light waves" for researchers from point A to point B when they need it. The CIC has a membership and a seat on the board of National Lambda Rail. It similarly skirts the northern regions of the country.

UW-Madison is exploring the building of a Northern Tier Networking Consortium fiber network from Chicago, through Milwaukee, Minnesota, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho and western Washington. WiscNet, UW-Milwaukee, UW-Eau Claire and the UW System OLIT office are joining in the effort. DOT fiber has been leased from near Minneapolis to the Illinois border. Connections to Chicago are being negotiated, and the University of Minnesota is connecting to the fiber in Wisconsin.

Ron Kraemer reported that in addition to WiscNet, there is currently a full motion, non-IP video network in Wisconsin. As due dates for the contracts for the video network approached, the WENCC initiative began looking into the procurement of a converged network. The UWS position was that education should run the educational network. The DOA position was that the network should be a managed service that was bid out to telecommunication providers. A functional RFI was released and returned. Then the governor stopped the technical RFI in mid January. Many groups expressed their positions and a new group was formed called WCNI, and the RFI is about to go back out. The state is still bidding a managed service network, and the university is still interested in creating networking that meets educational needs.

The governor has said he wants a state network that serves everyone, i.e., the groups that developed the WENCC initiative. The video networks are subsidized by the state universal service fund and the federal E-Rate. DOA believes that only a contracted, managed network can maximize the available subsidies. Currently, WiscNet doesn't apply centrally for E-Rate, but facilitates the applications of its members. However, a managed network service cannot provide the level of connectivity and the type of research initiatives outlined by Annie Stunden above.

WiscNet is governed by its members through an elected, representative board. The WADEN video network governs its applications, but not the network itself because DOA manages the vendor contract for them. Hence there is a philosophical gulf between two different portions of the educational community.

Currently the UWS is free to build its own education and research network and Katharine Lyall has authorized the design of a UWS networking initiative. The committee will involve technical and business talent from around the UWS to create a roadmap for the UWS.

ITMC Breakout Session

Learn@UW Update - David Wirth, Kathy Christoff & Kathy Pletcher

There are six sub-committees working on the D2L implementation

The Functional Request sub-committee is gathering priorities for suggested upgrades and submitting them to the vendor. As a result of these efforts, new functionalities are being installed this month, and will go live on May 27th. There are still quite a few lower priority requests pending. Some of the higher priority items are whiteboard functionality and Unicode support for foreign languages.

The Training subcommittee is facilitiating placeware meetings of the site adminstrators and LTDC members. They are building learning objects and documents. This is a change from the old model of sending out trainers from the central utitlity to the campuses.

The Conversion subcommittee has a tool that will take courses from WebCT and Blackboard and move them to D2L. However, many faculty are choosing to rebuild their courses from scratch.

The Service Level Agreement subcommittee will be updating the SLA in the May timeframe. Changes will include setting an annual upgrade schedule and the allocation of disk usage to the different institutions.

The Technical subcommittee is looking at the development of additional components, such as the whiteboard and a Learning Object Repository.

The Integration Subcommittee is working on IAA, submission of grades from D2L and connectivity with libraries and portals. Five institutions are already using the IAA authentication hub. Learn@UW can store grades for students. The subcommittee is analyzing what it will take to move the final grades to the campus student information systems. Feedback on the list of initial issues has been solicited from the campuses by April 15th. Another goal is to integrate online library resources into the Learn@UW courses. This effort is not yet well developed, and more complex than the submission of grades. A few UWS campuses have active portals. The goal is to implement single or shared sign-on between portals and Learn@UW courses.

General information about Learn@UW can be found at http://learnuw.wisconsin.edu. A more technical site is under development.

The first international Desire2Learn user conference is being held at Grainger Hall at UW-Madison in conjunction with the annual distance learning conference on August 2nd and 3rd. For more information, see http://d2l-userconf.org. Registration will begin on May 17th and the cost is $80. Proposals for conference sessions are welcome.

UW-Green Bay's Experience

Kathy Pletcher described UW-Green Bay's experience with D2L. UW-Green Bay began with pilot courses that were hosted on the vendor's server in the summer of 2003, and this semester more than half of the students have at least 1 course using D2L. There are 90 instructor accounts out of 150 faculty and instructional staff. Of special interest, is a required art safety course that was developed by the risk management staff. There is a similar blood-born pathogen awareness course. A FERPA awareness course for data custodians and others is also under development. Courses for library student assistants and computer lab workers have also been developed. A music camp counselor training course is available to students from other UWS institutions before they take jobs at UW-Green Bay.

David Wirth, John Wilson and Peter Mann are making site visits to all of the UWS institutions. Blackboard and WebCT licenses will run out at the end of this fiscal year, so it is important to convert all of the simpler courses now, and the more complex courses as the tool is further developed.

APBS Update - Al Fish

The Appointment Payroll and Benefits System (APBS) project is in the midst of system testing, which will continue through most of the summer. The goal is to ensure that APBS meets the UWS business requirements and that all components are reliable for the go-live in January 2005 and to build peoples' confidence. The timeframe includes:

• March - June, Performance Testing
• June - August, Functional Integration Testing
• August, Evaluation of the System Test.

The components of the system test include:

• functionality
• integration and interoperability with other systems
• performance
• stress
• documentation and procedures
• operations

The testing participants include:

• the APBS team
• UWPC
• FASTAR
• the UWS institutions

Educational opportunities will include:

• regional data warehouse discussions
• early adopter training
• self-paced e-learning modules
• face to face training
• bi-weekly WisLine presentations on special topics
• process re-engineering workshops

Access to the information in APBS will be through:

• Lawson forms
• Drill around capability within Lawson
• Lawson standard reports
• The HR Writer point and click reporting tool
• Lawson Enterprise reporting functionality (similar to Brio)
• The Data Warehouse

Lawson will be a source of information for data marts for persons/employees, positions, benefits, payroll, absence management.

Data Marts	Initial Testing	Managed Release
Employee/Position	April	June
Payroll	May	July
Benefits	June	August
Absence Management	August	October

Not within the scope of the initial rollout of the data warehouse are visa information, info about pending status changes, garnishments, tax profiles, eligibility groups and data that is external to APBS, such as the budget and SFS.

Reports will be available through the Lawson portal. The initial focus is on preparing high risk reports for external authorities, e.g., taxation. Reports will be generated on specified dates and time or triggered by significant events. There are many possible formats for exporting reports. Printing of reports will be avoided. People will get reports via the enterprise reporting tool, with the data transparently coming from either the Lawson database or the data warehouse with drill around capabilities between them.

The APBS hardware environment at FASTAR is based on a 16 CPU IBM box running AIX. It is logically partitioned into a web server and a server for the Lawson application and Oracle. The system will dynamically allocate CPUs as needed to the various processes. The Windstar taxation software will run on a separate server. All three servers will be connected to the ESS mass storage system which is mirrored to provide high availability and reliability. There are separate servers for the development environment.

APBS is working on authentication via the IAA authorization hub. Kronos issues are still being addressed. Ed Meachen reproted that the Common Systems Review Group has provided a portion of the funding for Kronos for student time reporting.

The public APBS internet site is http://www.uwsa.edu/hr/apbs The UWS intranet site is http://systemwide.uwsa.edu/apbs.

IAA Update - Bill Scheuerell and David Alarie

Integration, Authetication and Authorization (IAA) consolidates identity information from various UW-System repositories, including data feeds from the campuses. It provides cost effective authentication of people from each campus into common systems. It avoids the need for systemwide usernames and passwords. It keeps credential management at the local campuses, where it is performed most effectively. In addition to Learn@UW, which was mentioned above, other systems that will begin using the IAA authentication hub are Hyperion (formerly Brio), Kronos and APBS.

On December 23, 2003, Ed Meachen formed an IAA Governance Group to develop policies for its use. The group membership is centered around student needs because of FERPA issues. The group is charged with stewardship of registry data and making recommendations for the use of IAA. A Service Level Agreement, Guidelines for Acceptable Use and a Memo of Understanding are in draft form.

Batch data feeds are supplied to the IAA registry from seven UWS institutions including the UWPC. Near real time (NRT) feeds are supplied by UW-Colleges, UW-Green Bay and three functions at UW-Madison. At this point in time, a few campuses still haven't supplied a base feed of people information. The campuses that are using D2L for authentication are also supplying supplemental feeds. Until every campus supplies those supplemental feeds, applications like APBS can't rely upon IAA for authentication services. A challenge on each campus is linking the UW System person ID to the local credentials because these typically don't reside in the same place.

The next version of SFS will be capable of authenticating against an external LDAP database, so it could potentially use the IAA authentication hub once all of the campus data is in it. It was suggested that all institutions begin supplying their data by the summer so the hub can be used for Learn@UW in the fall and APBS in January.

Introduction of Procurement Director

Lorie Voss introduced Helen McCain who has been the procurement director since November. She has considerable experience in state purchasing, including information technology. Helen complimented the group on how well everyone within the UWS works together.

ADL Academic Co-Lab Initiative - Ed Meachen and David Wirth

The vision of the Advanced Distributed Learning (ADL) initiative is to develop the next generation of online learning. It is six years old. It was begun in 1998 when the DoD and other government agencies became interested in a set of emerging e-learning standards. The ADL strategy is to bring all of these standards together. Vendors that provide online learning to the government will be mandated to design to these standards. The SCORM sharable content object reference model provides an industry standard learning and run time environment. UW System and the technical colleges joined the ADL in January 2000 when a Memo of Understanding was signed with the Department of Defense to create an academic laboratory within the UW System.

The ADL initiative is now focussed on stabilizing the development of the standards so that the vendors can catch up. When the standards are adequately tested, they are brought forward to standards bodies, such as the ISO. The ADL initiative holds competitions on the interoperability of course management systems. D2L was the first vendor to be certified as SCORM compliant. The latest iterations of Blackboard and WebCT are also SCORM compliant.

There are only four Co-Labs in the United States, and only one Academic ADL Co-Lab, located at the University Research Park. It is the focal point for universities and colleges that are testing and promoting efforts in next generation online learning. It has partnerships with institutions around the world.

The ADL Co-Lab is working on applied research projects for the Department of Education, NSF, DoD and the Hewlitt Foundation among others. It has developed a number of tools, including a visualizer for sequencing XML content documents. Training intiatives include the SCOurse initiative (http://www.academiccolab.org/learn) for training about Sharable Content Objects (SCOs).

The Co-Lab also certifies companies and content management systems for SCORM compliance, many from offshore. APBS training modules have been jointly developed with UW Learning Innovations. The effort may serve as a model for ERP training within the UWS and beyond.

Common System Interoperability Architecture Working Group - Nina Boss

The Common System Interoperability Architecture Working Group (CSIAWG, hubcap.doit.wisc.edu/~nb3/interoperability/) is comprised of eleven people representing many campuses, central systems and common systems. It began in May 2003, and its mssion is to develop and recommend supported options for interoperability among information systems across the UWS. It has been charged to define and communicate:

• guidelines
• best practices
• standards
• tools sets
• archictectural models

An informal survey of current and planned opportunities for interoperability and integration within the UWS identified 167 heterogeneous examples. Systems that must interoperate at some level, because their business processes are intertwined, include:

• student administration
• APBS
• learning management
• SFS

Gartner research shows that 50% of IT resources are spent on integration. There is also an opportunity cost because ineffecient data exchange yields stale data. Today some systems are operating in silos, and some are integrated so tightly that others cannot be included. The Learn@UW effort is a carefully planned integration project, but it is still a set of one-shot solutions for integrating student data and IAA to Learn@UW. The more campuses that are added, more tightly-coupled links are created and the more brittle the entire system becomes.

Interoperability is more than data integration, it is a new way of thinking that takes advantage of new technologies. It creates a level of abstraction based upon a service oriented architecture (SOA) of loosely coupled service-based solutions at the end points. A service is a business process that has a clearly identified provider and one or more customers. An architecture is a set of guidelines, or a model. Conceptually, consumers ask questions of the service registry, which contains solutions that the service provider has published. IAA is an example of an existing service within the UWS.

Critical success factors for moving to the SOA model are:

• moving in a phased approach
• including interoperability requirements in RFPs
• establishing SOA as a strategic direction
• resolving business process and data policy issues

The CSIAWG's next steps are to:

• build strong executive sponsorship
• add detail to the architecture
• evaluate technologies

Joint Session of the ITMC and CWCW

Understanding Web Standards - Daniel Frommelt

What are the web standards?

A web year is three months long because that is how long it takes to come up with a new web technology thanks to collaboration.

The World Wide Web was invented in 1989 and released in 1990. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) was formed in 1994 to establish and promote common protocol goals and worry about interoperability. In 1997, concerns about web accessibility arose.

The W3C is a lot like the UN, it works through consensus and collaboration. The current web standards as expressed by http://www.webstandards.org include:

• XHTML 1.0 or higher
• XML 1.0 or higher
• CSS level 1 and CSS level 2
• DOM level 1 and DOM level 2
• ECMAScript 262

In 2000, all browsers began to support web standards, however a lot of pre-existing, non-conforming pages already existed. Note that the html and sgml working groups don't exist anymore, there is is just XHTML. There is no more development of the HTML standards. Some definitions include:

• XML is a flexible text format that describes data for exchange on the web and elsewhere
• CSS is used to control the presentation
  • it separates content from design
  • one cached file controls many pages
• DOM allows programs and scripts to dynamically access and update content

What are the benefits of web standards?

Even after four years, the word about standards has still not gotten out to everyone. Standards result in pages rendering more accurately and consistently, even in old browsers. Supporting standards solves many web accessibility concerns. The standards also make the pages smaller in size. Alternative devices, such as cell phones and PDAs can also view the pages. Search engines can find content quicker and rate the pages more accurately. Printer friendly pages for an entire university web site can be created with one CSS file.

The best example that shows the power of using CSS to redesign web pages is http://www.csszengarden.com. It shows how pages can be completely redesigned by just editing the CSS file and replacing the images while leaving the content unchanged.

Web standards allow for backward compatibility because:

• pages are compliant with older browsers without making a separate set of pages
• design fails gracefully - it may not be pretty, but the information is there

Web standards allow forward compabilitiy because:

• compliant user agents receive information that is better designed and presented
• we are not committed to one platform or browser
• we are ready for what the future may bring in the way of PDAs, cell phones, etc.

Web standards save bandwidth because:

• the design is in one file which results in code reduction
• the CSS design files are cached so viewing subsequent pages on the same site saves significant traffic

What do non-webmasters need to know?

All people who design pages should get the training they need to develop compliant pages. There are other problem areas asuch as:

• web enabled applications
• courseware applications
• student administrative systems
• content management systems

We need to ask, does this new system support the W3C standards?

The CWCW has put links to resources at http://www.uwec.edu/cwcw/webstandards and http://www.uwplatt.edu/~web/webstandards. Not all of the UWS institutions have representation on the UWS CWCW.

ITMC Breakout Session

Electronic Portfolios at UW-Eau Claire - Scott Oates and Brian Van Grunsven

There are many ePortfolio vendors. Some charge significant annual fees for each student, and the site is owned by the vendor. UW-Eau Claire is a member of the ePort Consortium that is developing its own technology (http://eportconsortium.org). Other members include IUPUI, Bowling Green, Penn State, Maricopa and UCLA. Corporate members includce Microsoft, Blackboard, the Community of Science, eCollege and others.

UWEC's institutional needs for eportfolio technology include:

• assessing whether or not UW-Eau Claire is providing learning experiences that achieve the university's goals
• directly assessing departmental goals via student papers and projects
• following Wisconsin's public law PI 34 for the preparation of K-12 teachers which demands that schools of education grow and develop in terms of ten teaching standards

Each summer, a faculty group reads and scores projects that were completed by the graduating seniors to determine how well the institution is doing to help students achieve the 11 baccalaureate goals. All student names are removed from the electronic and paper portfolios.There are cultural divides between faculty that want to move to electronic portfolios and those that don't.

An online tutorial is used to explain the steps students need to follow to manage their eportfolio. The eportfolio has 12 papers and/or projects and students are given guidelines of what to submit as evidence of meeting the desired goals. There is no way to ensure that students submit their best work instead of just completing the requirement and moving on. There are still unanswered questions regarding how long students can keep their eportfolios when they become alumni and whether there will be a charge for that service. The system has the capability for students to give passwords for others to enter and view their work. The project intends to expand into using eportfolios for faculty tenure and promotion.

To test drive the ePort software:

• http://itmc.with.uwec.edu
• username: itmc
• password: aj1n

Institution Roundtable

UW-Eau Claire

In a couple of weeks, campus web pages will be converted to using the CSS standard instead of templates. There is campuswide coverage for 802.11b but they are looking for wider range, possibly MMBS with a 20 mile range when the price comes down. The ECB-licensed ITFS frequencies could be used. They are working with UW-Stout and the Technical Colleges to do a pilot. A telecom feasiblity study is underway to look at the future viability of Centrex versus voice over IP, cellular phones and the purchase of phone switch. Video over IP initiatives will be demonstrated later today. They routinely connect via compressed video to a satellite campus in Marshfield for 8 hours per day on dedicated links. A digital archive management project using Extensis is underway to share news and publicity photos and slide collections. The data warehouse contiues to grow. The next steps in the eportfolio project are faculty tenure and promotion. Viruses have been a big issue. Norton has been licensed for all campus computers as well as home use. The homebuilt bandwidth control system also detects virus activity. Funding the refreshing of classrooms is also an issue, and the costs will continue to grow. The administrative systems will likely be replaced with Oracle not PeopleSoft.

UW Extension

UW Extension students are expecting to do more over the network. There are faculty and staff in every county and on every campus who deal with a million students a year. therefore identity management is crucial. The video network is a big issue because ICS does bridging of audio and video. The future of state networking will have a significant impact on how they do business. They are also working with IP video as will be demonstrated in the next session. They also work with Wisconsin Public Television and Wisconsin Public Radio, which are going digital, which has spawned a digital asset management project. The technologies are new and the products are expensive. A new calendar and email environment is being researched. A freeware help desk management software package will probably be adopted. Storage and software licensing costs are increasing.

UW-Green Bay

The Ad Astra software is being used to schedule classrooms. The goal is to gather faculty profiles so they can be matched with the appropriate spaces. Upgrading and adding high tech classrooms is a significant cost, so an effort is underway to do so appropriately. The biggest summer project will be an upgrade to Windows XP on all workstations. Beginning next year, there will be base funding to refresh all hardware and operating systems on a three year cycle. Multimedia workstations are being added to the general access labs for students who are building eportfolios. The Peoplesoft installation is largely complete. The egradebook is currently being piloted and an interface is being constructed to the testing scanning system for large classes. The campus technology plan is up for revision. A web survey of faculty feedback is underway. Another residence hall will open in the fall resulting in 40% of the students living on campus. Supporting Macintoshes has been difficult because of a vacancy that was eliminated during the budget cuts. Macintoshes tend to not work well in an Exchange environment. A new version of Mac Office will be released in the summer. Their successes with D2L were discussed previously

UW-La Crosse

Security is a major issue. Arrangements are being made to purchase an authorization tool for granting network access. A new administrative platform was installed last summer. The next step is redesigning the administrative applications themselves over the next five years. Preparations are underway for APBS and IAA. D2L is going well and most faculty are taking the opportunity to redo their courses. The process of selecting D2L stimulated interest among the faculty. The number of wireless access points was increased fourfold over the last year and mobile computing is being promoted. The instructional podiums are being standardized, locked down and imaged remotely. The podiums will include plug-ins for laptops and other ad hoc equipment. An inventory of classroom and lab technology is in progress because the funds are insufficient to refreshing all of it. Nevertheless, there are calls for still more classroom and lab technology.

UW-Madison

In addition to the big system initiatives mentioned earlier in the conference, a 10gbps 21st Century campus network backbone was implemented in January. It connects 180 buildings and 500 LANs. The goal has been to establish one network, rather than a collage of networks. Three options have been presented to campus units:

1. DoIT will manage the network for them
2. DoIT will work collaboratively with them
3. DoIT will delegate management of the network to them, but retain the ability to override

At first there was a lot of interest in the delegation model, but as tools have been developed to empower the departments, more are choosing to go with the collaborative model. The network and computer operating center has been improved and 5 new network engineers will manage the campus network and WiscNet. A three tier firewall strategy is being implemented at the network edge, the server level and the desktops. Technology people from all over campus are being involved in the firewall project, which slows down the process but makes for a better result. A new backup machine room for business continuity is under construction to provide redundant core servers. UW-Madison is now developing programs for the research channel so their faculty can see what is being done with the new network. A major project is underway to ensure that all of the necessary hooks and links for APBS are in place. Courses are being converted to D2L. The large introductory courses are particularly challenging. UW-Madison is also beginning to work with Michigan, Indiana, Stanford and MIT to develop the next generation open source courseware system, Sakai (www.sakaiproject.org)

UW-Milwaukee

The issue of most interest to the ITMC is the implementation of the Peoplesoft portal. The team has a well structured approach that is being shared with the UWS Collaterals Group. Scalability is a concern, which is leading toward a capacity on demand approach. Therefore, the Portal Team will have to create metrics and measures to determine how it is performing. The Core Service Team methodology is resulting in problems and successes. Most of the teams are still in the applied use phase. This month there will be a campuswide discussion on metrics, measures and procedures while avoiding policy questions as much as possible. The struggle is to create partnerships on campus and shift the ownership of technology back to the constituents with IT becoming a service provider. Not all of the teams understand what this means and they get stuck in the assessment phase because they are afraid of the changes that might result. The File Sharing Core Service Team is about to report in. Its work is designed to support the Email Core Service Team to obviate the need to use email for file storage. The Content Managment System (CMS) Core Service Team will begin their campus assessment soon. The CMS space has changed in the last couple years because of the web-centric nature of most information, even information in documents. A methodical push towards wireless has begun.

UW-Oshkosh

The College of Education has received a grant to use Chalk and Wire for eportfolios. Antoher group is looking at eportfolios from a campus perspective. A new Sun system for email and calendaring is receiving final approval. Touchnet will be used for credit card payments. Wireless networking is working well and being expanded. Faculty are becoming more mobile with laptops, which is resulting in the resegmenting of the network.

UW-Parkside

The PeopleSoft SIS implementation is well underway. In the meantime, dual entry is being done for Financial Aid. Preparations are underway for APBS and IAA. An RDS project is also being launched to enable reporting from PeopleSoft.

UW-Platteville

A tristate initiative aims to add 2,000 students to the campus over 6 years, which drives the need for more physical space and the tracking of their unique tuition situations. Full web registration will be launched this summer via Peoplesoft. By the end of the summer, all campus buildings will have wireless access, as well as the farm. The network will be upgraded during the summer. The tallest building on campus will be evacuated and remodeled over the summer. Credit cards will be re-accepted via the web in the fall. Scheduling and calendaring software is being investigated by the registrar's office to fully utilize the high tech classrooms.

UW-River Falls

The UW-River Falls chancellor recently died in a car accident. The biggest IT project is the implementation of the PeopleSoft student information system. It is moving into an extended development phase. Bringing it online required a major commitment from the entire institution. An ancillary project was an LDAP high availability project for PeopleSoft and other systems. The goal is to be operational with D2L in the fall, with testing during the summer. Approximately 300 WebCT and 500 Blackboard courses need to be converted. A help desk management system will be acquired soon. Major classroom remodeling initiatives will take place in the summer.

UW-Stout

The second year of the laptop program is running with 3,500 students. In the fall, all juniors will receive new laptops at the same time as new laptops are given to the freshmen. Funds have been pulled back from a number of departments and put into a Keyserver service to distribute software to students. A portal was built for the laptop program that includes a course delivery system that allows click throughs to Blackboard, D2L and locally written courses. Every session of every class has a presence. Block scheduling has been implemented so that sections are made up only students who have or don't have laptops. Departments can order new machines for faculty and staff via a cost matching program with central IT. The campus backbone has been upgraded to OC-48. A new process has been implemented for MIS requests where people describe how the project meets the university's strategic goals and how it provide a return on investment. The requests are sorted by division and sent back to the division for prioritization. The tool will be used to fight scope creep. The programmers don't always like this process because they are accustomed to doing favors for people.

UW-Superior

A major goal has been to make the network secure and reliable through segmenting and an edge firewall. The university technology committee is becoming more aware of infrastructure needs and managed switches will be installed over the summer. The eventual goal is to add voice over IP. An edge appliance to control spam is under investigation. Netreg will be implemented for the dormitory clients to ensure that virus protection is up to date. The WiscNet bandwidth may be doubled if it can be afforded. Most faculty are beginning to do online grading with Peoplesoft. A Peoplesoft portal for students is targeted for next fall. A Computer Science class is helping to define what the portal should contain. The goals are to include Peoplesof self service, elearning and ecommunity, which includes important dates, student-defined discussion groups, etc. Exchange 2003 was recently implemented and all account creation has been automated from Peoplesoft.

UW System Administration

The safety office has developed a LearningSpace course for OSHA training. Since the LearningSpace licenses are up for renewal, it will be moved to D2L by May 1. Converting the student tracking is particularly challenging. If this conversion is successful, additional training modules will be created in D2L. EEO functionality is being bridged by a pilot project during the transition to APBS. A historical trust fund database is being rehosted from FoxPro to SunGuard and maybe to SFS for longitudinal analysis. A financial CDR is being developed. There is a Blackberrry contract at DOA, and the possibility of using Blackberrys has been raised at UWSA.

Video over IP - Ron Kraemer, Jim Lowe, Nick Dvoracek and Matt Schmidt

Two of the panel participants were live via video over IP from UW-Oshkosh and UW-Stevens Point. Last month, UW-Eau Claire hosted a system-wide workshop to bring together IP engineers with video engineers. Before the workshop, several institutions participated in a case study that is reported at http://video.uwec.edu.

One of the largest issues with video over IP is the availability of sufficient bandwidth to take scheduling concerns off the table. When faculty and deans can count on connectivity without the intervention of technologists, video over IP will be a success. The collaborative language program went to video over IP to defray ISDN charges. This has resulted in the transfer of budget from enduser ISDN charges to the Internet bill. In the beginning, there were a few problems at the edges of the campus networks. After two semesters, there are very few problems. Originally UW-Stevens Point was part of the WONDER analog video network, but since the IP equipment has arrived, they have switched to using that technology almost exclusively.

IP video frees the participants from having to meet in distance education classrooms. Mobile devices can be brought to any room on campus that has a data jack. It is important to test the connections ahead of time. The video has a little bit of lag and a little less quality compared to analog video networks. By going to a fiber network, it may be possible to avoid some of the issues and labor involved in setting up VPN circuits with QoS when it is necessary to guarantee the highest quality, e.g., to demonstrate a surgical procedure. Most programs don't require that level of investment. Last year in a pilot project, WiscNet and ICS brought together all of the Technical College presidents over IP video. It was a success, and the Technical Colleges are moving to adopt the technology.

Many of the K-12s in Wisconsin still use T1 circuits for data, which is inadequate for video over IP. The current charging models tie costs to bandwidth, which is problematic. K-12s also don't have technical staff readily available. The ICS website has a lot of info on H.323, see link at http://video.uwec.edu, including configuring firewalls, packet shapers, etc.

Report from Help Desk Breakout Group - Carol Accola

The Help Desk breakout has been highly successful. There are a lot of differences between organizations in terms of structures and tools, and yet many of the issues are the same, e.g.,

1. relying upon student employees
2. integrating the help desk with training
3. drawing the line on support
4. combatting viruses

By using the UW-Eau Claire wireless network, call tracking software was demonstrated from all over the state, as well as remote assistance tools. UW-Milwaukee and UW-Madison staff 7 x 24 help desk services and pay premium wages for 3rd shifts and holidays. Since the group last got together five yearas ago, the quality of the tools has improved and users are more sophisticated so the questions are more more challenging. People are also calling more often about their personally owned devices, including PDAs. The group will probably continue to meet once per year at a campus, separately from the ITMC. A listserv already exists. To sign up, see the information posted on the ITMC web site (www.uwsa.edu/olit/itmc/itmcinfo.htm)

Report from the CWCW Breakout Group - Lillian Hillis

This was one of the best CWCW sessions in the last three years. It was a great group for exploring collaboration and efficiency and building relationships. The group now has a formal charter and a five member executive committee. Some campuses are beginning to use RSS news feeds. There was additional discussion of web standards and someone will be identified to track their development. At the next meeting in July, the Zen Garden approach, described above, will be applied to the CWCW site itself. Some examples are already available at http://www.uwec.edu/cwcw. An Extensis demo was organized on the spur of the moment. Many campuses are struggling with standardizing and distributing the development of smaller web applications, such as a job board or an e-postcard system. Most exciting, was the discussion of a proposal to buy a common software application for monitoring web site accessibility and identifying broken links.

Next ITMC Conference

ITMC Chair Mariann Ritland thanked the ITMC Executive Committee and the local assistance from Paul Deidrich, Lillian Hillis and Carol Accola. Brian Busby and Donna Whyte were thanked for handling the registration website and printing the badges. An email will be sent out with a link to a conference survey. The next conference will be September 13th and 14th at the Heidel House in Green Lake.