Information Technology prepares a summer’s worth of technology changes

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Some departments at Central Michigan University can take the summer to recoup and refresh between semesters.

This isn’t that kind of summer for Information Technology.

Several changes intended to promote mobility and student success are being implemented or are planned for the coming summer months.

These include the recent change to iCentral as default online portal and upcoming reworking of the e-mail systems and Blackboard service.

Roger Rehm, vice president of Information Technology, said he sees the multi-pronged initiative as a convergence of several factors.

“It’s an intersection of a lot of needs and opportunities,” Rehm said.

One concern is the need for a tighter budget as Michigan struggles with an economic   depression.

The combined changes in the works save the university about $1.5 million, Rehm said.

He said the total budgetary savings may be less as many activities could, for example, make each task performed take 1/16 less time per employee – a relatively small amount and difficult to pinpoint, but significant when considered at a university-wide scale.

Other changes

He said the central element of the CMU experience for many students is its presence online – from its Mount Pleasant campus to any of its off-campus programs.

The foundation of that experience is iCentral, a new portal which has been in testing for several months and became the new default on May 15.

“(The transition) has not been as smooth as we would have liked,” Rehm said.

He said long load times and trouble accessing iCentral’s services had plagued many users. IT is now working with Microsoft to solve these problems and increase speed and reliability.

Rehm said the most noticeable change for students coming back in the fall will likely be in the e-mail system.

“For any student familiar with any modern interface, Google, Yahoo, this will be like falling off a log,” Rehm said.

He said the new Zimbra-based system, which costs just over $200,000 for its first year of use, will be much easier to use and more in line with the “Web 2.0” movement of web design.

But it will also contain greatly increased functionality, said Help Desk Manager Jeffrey McDowell.

“There’s a lot more rich feature set,” he said.

One new feature is the “My Briefcase” service which lets students use 10 gigabytes of storage to store, share and collaborate on documents with people inside and outside of the university system.

Derek Leib, assistant manager at the Help Desk, said the service will allow much easier mobile phone support, including iPhones, Blackberry and Android devices, as well as support for Outlook and Mail on Macs.

“There was extensive testing (on the service) done with various support groups,” Leib said.

There will be a period of a few hours when students can not access e-mail while the transition is made at the end of June, though it will be done during a time of low usage, Rehm said.

The university’s public labs will be converted to a print quota-based system at the end of June as the summer II semester begins.

The new system will give students $10 worth of prints, or about 250 black and white pages, for free and allow for more to be bought in $2 increments.

Grawn Hall’s computer lab will no longer be the College of Business Administration’s responsibility and Information Technology will be in charge of the lab on July 1.

Rehm said the lab will still be supported by the CBA and that bringing both it and Woldt Hall’s lab under one administration will make it easier to ensure at least one public lab is available as often as possible.

CMU will also update to Blackboard 9.1 from version 8 before the fall semester begins.

Rehm said the new version is a bottom-up redesign that includes several tools like integrated collaboration tools and blogs.

Though CMU retained its license to use Blackboard at slightly over $90,000 annually, the decision was made to hold off on upgrading last year until any major problems with the new version were worked out.

“We didn’t want to go live with something new, and I’m glad we didn’t in retrospect,” Rehm said.