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A Message from Timothy O'Rourke, Vice President of Computer and Information Services

January 18, 2008

Welcome back to Temple. I hope everyone is refreshed and ready for a new semester. To help you get re-acclimated to life on campus, I would like to update you on the current status of the ERP project and announce some new enhancements to our services.

Project

is in full swing

An Executive Steering Committee comprised of high-level and senior Temple management has been meeting on a regular basis to provide direction for the project and make major decisions. Full-time project managers for Temple and SunGard have also been appointed. Working project teams representing academic and administrative units throughout the university are also in place.

The Project Enterprise team members have attended training sessions on analyzing and diagramming business processes. Members of the finance, human resources, and the student project teams are now in the process of evaluating and documenting current business processes in their functional areas. Space on the 4th floor of the TECH Center will be available soon to allow dedicated project members to focus and collaborate. The space includes a thirty-seat training room for training project team members, as well as the Temple community, on using the Banner system.

Over the winter break, the computer hardware for Project Enterprise was installed, including approximately 60 Dell Windows and Linux servers. The project will be implemented in a series of major modules (such as finance, human resources, and student) and will take four to five years to complete. To view the list of the modules that Temple will install, see SunGard’s press release on the Banner Unified Digital Campus.

A high-level overall project plan is being developed and will be released in February. The first application planned for launch is “fsaAtlas,” which will be used to store information about international students.

Computer Services will continue to keep you informed of the status and major milestones of the Enterprise project. A Project Enterprise web site is under development and will be announced soon.

Verify your emergency contact information
Last semester, Temple implemented an emergency notification system, called MIR3. This system is designed to quickly broadcast alerts to the campus community via e-mail, text messaging, TDD/TTY, land lines, and cell phones.
 
In the event this system needs to be used, it is critical that Temple has your correct emergency contact information on file. Please take a moment to verify/update your information as follows:

If you are student:
1. Log in to OWLnet.
2. Click on the Update Address tab.
3. Select Emergency Notification.

If you are a faculy/staff member:
1. Log in to Employee Self Service.
2. Click on Emergency Notification.

Blackboard receives upgrade
Computer Services also continues to improve our major systems. During the winter recess, the Blackboard system was upgraded to version 7.3. The new version of Blackboard contains enhancements to the Discussion Board interface as well as to the following tools:

• Create Groups (used by instructors to automatically create and populate groups within a particular course)
  
  
• Expo (used to create blogs and wikis that are independent of Blackboard courses and communities)
  
  
• Scholar (used to store, tag, and share bookmarks)
  
  
• Search LX (used to search for Blackboard content in courses/communities in which you are enrolled and/or teaching, or courses/communities open to guest access)

TurningPoint also receives upgrade
The TurningPoint classroom clicker software has been upgraded to version 2008. The upgrade offers new features, such as Office 2007 compatibility, plug and play hardware setup, expanded reporting options, and multiple language support. Instructors can obtain a free copy of this software from the Help Desk Download web site.

Temple improves spam filtering
Finally, I want to mention an ongoing issue that continues to impact our e-mail systems. According to a recent study, 90-95% of all Internet e-mail traffic in 2007 was spam. Temple is experiencing the same phenomenon, and as a result, managing this onslaught of traffic has posed a tremendous challenge.

Temple’s latest weapon in the spam wars has been the deployment of a new security appliance called Mirapoint RazorGate MailHurdle. Since bringing the MailHurdle system online in December 2007, two million messages a day have been flagged as spam and discarded before ever reaching Temple’s mail servers. The spam that gets through is actually a very small percentage of the spam that is sent to your account.

Computer Services will continue to track spamming trends and do our best to stay one step ahead of the spammers.

I would like to personally wish everyone my best wishes for a rewarding and successful Spring 2008 semester. For the latest technology news and announcements, please continue to visit the Computer Services web site.

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