September 2010
IT Connections Masthead
In This Issue
Opening to Rave Reviews
ITS Professional Development
IT Out and About
Tech Updates
Recognize Your Colleagues Good Work with ITS-U
First Term Enrollment Moves to MySlice
We're Upgrading SU's Wireless Network
Eulogy for a Network
Quick Links
Join Our Mailing List
Quick Notes
 
ITS Staff Milestones
 
Congratulations to the following for their years of service at Syracuse University:
 
Kevin Bom, Data Systems Administrator - 10 years
Ronald Martin Bunal, Information Technology Architect - 15 years
Michael Scheftic, Support Analyst - 20 years
Diane Oad, Senior Project Analyst - 25 years
Raymond Kopp, Information Technology Consultant - 25 years
Opening to Rave Reviews! 
Experience and innovations pay off for students, ITS
 IT'S Connected Logo
A team of almost 70 ITS employees, student staff and TEK Sytems temps fanned out across campus to welcome and support incoming students and their families during Opening week in August.  From the "Taking Care of Business" tent on the Quad, to the residence halls, to South Campus apartments, team members were on hand to help students connect their computers and other devices to the University networks, and to assist with other technology issues. 
 
ITS Student Technicians Paridhi and Mark
"Like last year, this year's was the smoothest move-in we've had on the IT side" said Chris Sedore, SU's Vice President for Information Technology/CIO. "Unquestionably, students had less difficulty than ever before connecting on their own to SU's networks, and our systems performed better than ever."
 
Students and parents were clearly impressed by the services they received, as shown in these comments provided on the follow-up survey:  
 "All the ITS people where really helpful and extremely entertaining. A guy fixed my laptop and it now has a little green t-rex sticker named after him stuck to my laptop. ITS rules!"

"The ITS people in my hall were very enthusiastic and helpful."

"They did a great job both in the main lounge and circling the building to assist any students that may have needed help!"

"Great Service. Keep up the good work."

"You're awesome!"

Preliminary survey responses indicate that 89% of students requesting assistance were "very satisfied" with the service they received, up 16% from last year.
 
Taking Care of Business
ITS Taking Care of Business

Jenny Gluck, Director of Academic Applications and Service Centers, attributes this success to the solid foundation of experience ITS has built.  "ITS's Opening team, lead by project manager David Hoalcraft, used the substantial improvements they put in place last year as the basis for a successful effort this year," she said. "Major innovations this year were to offer students the choice of having their problems addressed in their room or in the residence hall lobby, as well as increasing ITS's visibility in the residence halls with large lobby banners and posters on every floor. This year also saw the first use of Orange Tracker to capture service call information." 

The Sadler Lobby team
The ITS crew in the Sadler lobby
 During the five days of Opening (August 25-29), 7,742 residential students successfully connected to the campus networks.  The ITS Service Center took 642 support phone calls, and 614 residential students using hang tags received assistance. There were 1,404 requests for IT assistance, down almost 13% from 2009. 

"Thanks to all of you who played a part in welcoming our students to campus," said Chris Sedore. "This group effort ensured a confident start to the fall semester and you should take pride in helping our students start the year off in such a great way!"

 
 
IT Professional Development
Staff on the cutting edge 
 
Training & Education
 
Kevin Bom has been awarded the "OnBase Certified System Administrator" (OCSA) Certification, a professional credential awarded by Hyland Software to experienced OnBase system administrators who possess a specified level of product knowledge, an in-depth understanding of the OnBase solution in their organization, and a demonstrated ability to support and maintain that solution.
 
Craig Chartrand attended Crestron's "Programming For Certification" from July 21 - July 23, 2010 at their training facility in Rockleigh, NJ. This course is the third course in the series offered through the Crestron Technical Institute.  This class focused on writing custom control modules in Simpl+, a development tool that allows advanced programmers to create and compile custom control modules using a procedural language similar to C. The topics covered in this course include advanced string handling and parsing, TCP/IP socket communications, non-volatile memory operations, and file storage. 
 
 
IT Out and About
Connecting with the campus and beyond 
  
Heather Ketcham came in 3rd in her age group and 25th overall out of 730 women in the second annual Aflac Iron Girl Syracuse Women's Triathlon at Oneida Shores County Park on August 7, with an overall time of 1:32:06.  The Iron Girl series started in 2004 and now has 12 events nationwide. The Syracuse race is the only one in the Northeast, and featured a 600 meter swim, 30K bike and 5K Run. 
Heather Ketcham, Iron Girl (in the blue helmet)
Heather Ketcham, Iron Girl
  
Mike Wunderlich co-taught a Summer College class called Small Business Development, a collaboration between the iSchool and the Whitman School of Management.  Mitch Franklin, Assistant Professor from Whitman, covered primarily entrepreneurship and topics related to creating a new business, and Mike covered how to identify appropriate IT needs for the business as well as how to build a web server and website for that business.
 
Ross Valenti, web specialist for the School of Education, was a member of the silver medal Masters Division Men's Volleyball team at the Empire State Games.  He was an outside hitter on the winning Central team.
Tech Updates
Keeping current with software, systems, issues and devices
 
Smith Hall, Hoople/Gebby upgraded to 802.11n
 
As part of its Network Master Plan improvements, the wireless part of Smith Hall's upgrade is complete. With 29 new Cisco 3500i access points, Smith is the first main campus building to be completely 802.11n covered, followed by Hoople/Gebby.  As usual, the Network and Wiring Services group did a great job with this wireless rollout.  Over the summer, most of South Campus, including all residences there, were migrated to 802.11n.  See related article elsewhere in this issue.  
 
What ITS did this summer 
Check out the The Daily Orange article from the September 2 edition which provided a good look at a number of ITS initiatives that progressed over the summer.

 
   ITS-U Logo
 
Celebrate and recognize the excellent work of your colleagues!
 
 
Show your coworkers how much you appreciate them with the ITS-U! Appreciation Program.  For details, click here.
FTES Map
 
First Term Enrollment Moves to MySlice
New online process reduces costs, saves time, improves service
 
For years, during the summer, the Registrar's Office and the Schools/Colleges mailed inbound freshman and transfer students a wealth of information about their options at SU, along with forms to complete to furnish the University with the information it needs to connect these students with the appropriate academic, residential, athletic and other resources SU offers. Once returned by students, these forms constituted a blizzard of paperwork for data entry, to ensure timely and accurate class registration and program enrollments by the time these new members of the SU community arrived on campus for the Fall semester.
 
No more.
 
The First Term Enrollment Selections (FTES) Project, undertaken by the Registrar's Office in September 2009, with system support from ITS's Enterprise Application Systems (EAS), came to fruition when the entire process went live in MySlice on May 18. The project supports the University and Enrollment Management's goals and objectives to:  
  • Increase and enhance self-service for students
  • Support University's green initiative by reducing use of paper 
  • Reduce operational costs for the Registrar's Office and the Schools & Colleges
  • Reduce or eliminate the use of external course selection database (Access) used for the course selection data by utilizing PeopleSoft
These goals were met by utilizing PeopleSoft, and by creating a new page in My Slice (First Term Enrollment Selections), where students record their individual enrollment selections, and staff in the Schools and Colleges get access to the information entered by students.
 
Not only does this approach reinforce the first year student's experience with SU's digital environment via MySlice, it provides immediate global access and virtually eliminates mailing delays (and costs) on both ends of the process. In addition, FTES improves student/college communication, since the same form is viewed by both, and it allows for continual updating of student information to reflect additions and changes. Moving this paper- and time-intensive process to the University's central online system provides each student with course selection information for registration, and gets their choices back to the Registrar's Office and the Schools & Colleges sooner than in the past, and reduces the associated staff workloads. 
 
"We've come a long way from Mail Reg to MySlice," said University Registrar Maureen Breed, "and the input we received from the undergraduate schools and colleges was essential to this effort."
 
This project was developed and implemented by Mary DiMura, Giovanna Albaroni, and Steve Clark from the Registrar's Office, and Bill Keesler of Enterprise Application Systems.
 
For more information, contact Giovanna at x2429 or [email protected].
 
 
AirOrange X Logo 
We're upgrading SU's wireless network!
Students living on South Campus first to get faster wireless service
 
AirOrangeX, the wireless network at Syracuse University, is in the process of being upgraded to the 802.11n. This will bring us to the next generation of wireless technology, and provide faster connections that avoid interference problems which are more likely in the 2.4GHz band. It is also up to 3 to 5 times faster.
 
According to Peter Morrissey, Director of Networking, while the faster technology has existed for a few years, SU held off on the upgrade until the technology was mature.
 
"We were waiting for the vendors to go through a few iterations of it to make sure it was stable," he said. "The other issue was that in order to take advantage of it, the different laptops used to get on the network need the capability, and initially, not many of them had it."
 
To take full advantage of the upgrade, a network adapter is needed that supports 802.11n at 5 GHz. NICs that support both the A and N specifications will meet this requirement, and will be indicated as:
  • a/b/g/n
  • a/b/g/draft-n
  • a/g/n
  • dual band 802.11n
Mac laptops bought in the last couple of years (and the iPad) have this capability built right in. On Windows PCs this capability is generally an option, and not a standard feature at this time. It is an inexpensive upgrade in some cases, and can currently be found in computers in the $700 and up range if you look for it.
 
The following NIC specifications will also work on SU's network, but will never be able to take full advantage of 802.11n modes used at SU:
  • a/b/g  
  • a/g
  • b/g/n
  • g/n
  • b/g
The wireless network upgrade is being done in phases, and all residence halls should be complete by the end of summer, 2011.  As of August 1, 2010, all of the student residences on South Campus had been completed.  Smith Hall and Hoople/Gebby are the first buildings on the main campus in which the wireless upgrade has been completed.
 
Morrissey said ITS is not anticipating any difficulties and that there should be little if any network disruptions during the process.
 
"As far as we can tell, it's working very well," he said of the completed installations.
 
For more information, contact Peter Morrissey at x4111 or [email protected]
 
RIP AirOrange
 
Eulogy for a Network
SU's original wireless network retired after eight years
 
On September 6, 2010 ITS turned off the AirOrange wireless network. 
Implemented in 2002, AirOrange was the original SU wireless network, first present in pre-renovation Slocum Hall and started with four access points donated by Cisco via the iSchool's Dave Molta.
 
Chuck Savage and Andy Malloy were the lucky DSPs that got to be our guinea pigs, but the experiment went well. AirOrange was named in a rather enjoyable contest, with winner selected by then-CIO Dr. Benjamin Ware.
 
Four APs soon became fifty, fifty became four hundred, and it wasn't long before we were into the thousands. What started with 802.11b, with maximum data rates of 11 Mbps, quickly became a dual-band 802.11a/g (up to 54 Mbps) network and now is transitioning to 802.11n (up to 300 Mbps, if the wind is blowing right).
 
Every wireless design done on campus has been authored in-house by ITS, and Jim Pampinella's staff have embraced the knowledge, tools, and mindset needed to execute successful wireless installations without requiring costly integrators.
 
Soon we will see AD machines using wireless as they would the wire, which speaks volumes to the reliability of our wireless infrastructure and the value it has to the campus. We have seen the dorms become more than 90% wireless-only, serving a generation of students who can only guess what you're supposed to do with an ethernet cable.
 
We've come a long way from Steve Leonard's original wireless "web auth portal" and VPN-for-wireless-security model, and our 802.1x implementation has clearly been an unqualified success. The latest AirOrange portal came from the impressive mind of Randy Grimshaw, and is pretty slick compared to even commercial solutions.
 
So, there is one less wireless network on the air. We who design, install, and (most importantly) use wireless at SU will put a bit of our technology past behind us. As corny as this may sound, Thank You to everyone who helped us get here in one way or another, from clients who provide good feedback for troubleshooting, to our IT execs who provided the critical buy-in that greases the skids for this sort of innovation.
 
By Lee Badman

IT Connections is published monthly by Information Technology and Services at Syracuse University. Please submit story ideas and news items to Chris Finkle.

Phone: 443-2677