CIO BLOG

Adam Richardson joined our team this week as a Help Desk Technician. He is doing a great job already and many people in the MCLA community have already met him as he’s been out and about campus performing fixes and repairs.

If you want to say hi, you can find Adam in the Help Desk offices on the first floor of Murdock Hall, unless he’s out on a call!

Adam fills the position vacated by Bill Arzt on his retirement. Bill will be helping Adam get oriented by coming in mornings for a few days to “show him the ropes”, so look for Bill too to give him some grief about being a man of leisure. 

Sandy Macksey has moved her office from Public Safety to Freel Library where she shares space with the Administrative Computing group and is conveniently close to the telephone switch room.

If you have any telephone service requests, Sandy can be reached at x5297 and she welcomes visitors in Freel B04.

This move will allow Sandy to focus on her telecommunications responsibilities and provide space where she can offer training in the use of our telephony services.

It’s Wednesday, the day before Thanksgiving. All systems are running smoothly and the new E-Portfolio system has already received many uploads from students. It is quiet here right now: no student traffic in the hallway outside my office; the labs and classrooms are empty. The Internet traffic rate, which is normally up to 20 megabits per second by this time of morning is currently at just over 8 megabits. This gives me the opportunity to think back over my first year at MCLA (it’ll be a full year on December 7) and in spite of the economic troubles I feel good about the year. The college is dealing responsibly with the financial situation and in spite of it we have improved the college’s Internet connection, rolled out the e-portfolio system, replaced old academic data reporting systems for faculty and students, and made many other improvements to the technology infrastructure of the college.

I’d like to say Thank You to everyone at MCLA!! This is a great place with wonderful people and I’m really glad to be here.

Online registration has been going smoothly. This time around students will have noticed an addition to the registration process; a form to fill out to update your emergency contact info. Keeping this information up to date is important so that we can reach you if needed, or to reach your family, or other emergency contact, if something happens to you. Everyone, including faculty and staff, should keep contact info in Banner up to date. It’s like a free insurance policy!

Otherwise, all systems are running well and our Internet connection seems to be keeping up with demand. The board is green.

Our Internet provider, Time Warner, had what appeared to be a routing problem this afternoon a little after 4:30. The line appeared fine from our end but no traffic was passing from us to the Internet. Things were fine again about 15 minutes later but we are watching the line closely and do not consider the problem resolved.

This outage did not affect people getting to the MCLA website from outside; that runs over a different. line. We are hoping to make changes this winter that will make the connection more resilient for both incoming and outgoing traffic.

U.Mass Online had a problem with Blackboard Vista this morning. The system was unavailable for a while between 8:30am and 9am. They moved their systems over the summer from U.Mass Amherst to the U.Mass central facilities in Shrewsbury MA. In the long run this is a good thing for us at MCLA since it improves their ability to work with us on modification and network access, but they have had some growing pains.

The Information Technology staff at MCLA is an amazing bunch of very dedicated professionals. People who come to work here seem to stay for a long time, but eventually everyone moves on, if not to a new job then into retirement and that’s what Bill Arzt is doing. As a newcomer myself I’m sorry I’m not going to get to know Bill as well as others here know him; he’s been a much loved fixture in Computer Support for a long time.

Bill, I salute you and wish you well in your retirement!!

Even in these tough economic times Bill performs such an important function that we are moving quickly to fill the position he is vacating. Peter Allmaker is heading up the search committee and the advertisements appeared over the weekend. If you know anyone looking for a PC Technician job, have them send their resume to hr@mcla.edu.

Well, the summer’s over, students are back (and I’m glad to see them!), and services provided by Information Technology are starting to get used. A lot.

I’m still working my way through my first year at MCLA. On Labor Day, last week, I hiked up Mount Greylock with several hundred of my new friends and had a great time.

We are providing a major new service this year, an Electronic Portfolio. As we get underway this system will be used for faculty to collect work from students and, maybe more importantly, for students to build a collection of their work and accomplishments and share their MCLA experience. If you are part of the MCLA community and want to take a look, and maybe give it a try, go to the campus web page and click on “Learning Portfolio”.

As part of the various capital improvement projects going on on campus, the air conditioning unit for the main computer room in the basement of Freel Library is being replaced. When the engineers looked at the old unit back about 6 months ago they wanted to put in a temporary unit immediately because the didn’t think the old one would last until June. We decided that if it lasted until 2009 it would last another few months so in the interests of minimizing disruption and cost we decided to tough it out until a permanent replacement could be installed rather than risk a service interuption in the middle of the semester.

Our bet paid off and we made it through the spring semester. Now the old unit has been removed and the room is being cooled with four small portable temporary units while the new equipment is being installed. Watching the new cooling system wend its way through the library basement was amazing (I’m told by John Bromback). The device made it around the corner by the elevator with microns to spare.

Everyone in Computer Support Services and Administrative Computing are holding their breath until the new system is up and running, but once it is we will be well protected from overheated computers during the summer months and well positioned for growth in technology services over the next several years.

As the Chief Information Officer of MCLA I thought it would be a good idea to share my thoughts and plans with the MCLA community. This is that blog!