CIT Annual Report 2011

What’s Inside

• Recognitions 2011
• Mission and Goals 2011
• Retired Services 2011
• Staff 2011
• Stats & Facts 2011
• Accomplishments 2011
• CIT Professional Development & Service 2010-2011
• Specific Goals for 2011-2012

CIT Annual Report 2011

Message from the CIO

Welcome to the CIT 2010-2011 annual report. This has been a year of collaborations. CIT prides itself in being a team of people that fosters collaboration and empowers students, faculty and staff. This year we collaborated with many departments to make major changes to advance the College.

We collaborated across our own functional areas to select and transition to Google Calendar. Geneseo adopted the use of Google Apps for Education as our officially supported calendar platform for the entire campus - faculty, staff, and students. The Google calendar will provide us with new opportunities. For the first time, all our students will have access to use the calendar. CIT and other departments are developing innovative uses of the calendar through creating the ability to auto-load student and faculty course schedules and developing subscription-based calendars for various events to name a few. Other components of Google Apps for Education can provide our community with new tools to stimulate collaboration.

CIT also worked closely with College Communications to implement more attractive, easier to maintain web sites for both the Encompass and Geneseo Scene electronic publications and the UKnight alumni social networking site.

As College Advancement prepares for the campaign, we built, customized, and enhanced many SunGard and locally developed programs to help support operational workflow improvements for Advancement. We also implemented the Advancement Performance Management (APM) data warehouse product from SunGard to provide Advancement with advanced analytical support for the campaign.

In collaboration with the Library, some of the functions of the Newton Innovation Center have moved to a new Digital Media Lab (DML) housed in the Milne Library. The DML will provide our campus community with access to high-end equipment, applications and workstations for the development of coursework, projects and presentations in a location with seven days a week access.

Printing as an administrative service is an ongoing team endeavor between Procurement Services, CIT and Toshiba. Our goal is to provide an efficient, cost effective printing environment to meet needs. Our printing culture is an obstacle to overcome if we are to achieve real financial savings from printing. Ideally, a parallel effort to reduce the need to print by implementing more paperless processes and a “think green” attitude will help advance this undertaking.

In response to an inquiry from the Registrar's Office, CIT worked to improve performance under heavy load of KnightWeb for Spring 2011 course registration. In the past, the registrar spread out the registration time frame to reduce the load on our systems. Students were dissatisfied and felt the process provided unfair advantage in registration to some students without good reason. This was a difficult task but I believe we can call our effort a success. There were some minor glitches but each group (the groups were large and based on class year) were completely registered within 10-15 minutes after registration opened.

CIT’s service to the College community involves constantly moving technologically forward. This year we migrated our webmail service from SquirrelMail to RoundCube providing web-based mail users with improved performance and features. Our confluence wiki was also upgraded and the latest version provided wiki users with drag and drop file upload, easier ways to imbed multimedia media content and a new template giving more flexibility in the look of wiki pages. Newton classrooms had touch screens installed to provide an easier interface for using the technology in these rooms. The Pinnacle telecommunications system underwent a major upgrade and we implemented Emergency 911 service to provide location information from campus extensions in the event of an emergency. LAN line service was discontinued in residence hall rooms and a house phone system was installed in each hall. The wireless network coverage is being doubled this summer giving our campus as close to 100% wireless coverage as we can get. The most noticeable increase will be in our residence halls. Our credit card payment system was migrated from TouchNet to Nelnet. AxisTV digital signage expanded to include room schedule displays for eight new locations and the events channel has a new look and more content than in the past. Geneseo went mobile – m.geneseo.edu provides mobile users a designed for mobile look at Geneseo. We also upgraded our Microsoft Campus Agreement to the enterprise level giving us new tools that will furnish us with new ways to provide services and reduce costs. The South Hall Public lab lower level received a facelift this summer. Furniture that will enable students to work collaboratively replaced single workstation pods.

As we close the door on one academic year and open on another, I look forward to what lies ahead. Lastly, I wish to thank my colleagues in CIT for their invaluable work. They continue to demonstrate their expertise, dedication, creativity, and a willingness to accept new challenges and learn new technologies.

Sue Chichester
Chief Information Officer & Director, CIT