Three university programs have acquired an application from Hyland Software to manage documents and streamline workflow.
Addressing one of the key objectives of cloud computing, Microsoft this week said its Windows Azure platform will be available as an appliance that can run on customer and partner premises.
The University of Missouri has received an equipment grant from IBM to bolster its computational and storage capabilities for bioinformatics research. The grant will add an additional 64 processors and 24 terabytes of storage to the cluster resources run by the Columbia-based university's Bioinformatics Consortium.
IT support at Brown University is spending the summer migrating its campus community to Google Apps for Education. The university projected that the move could save a million dollars a year.
The challenges of managing information technology are weighing ever more heavily on in-house IT departments across all sectors. Coupled with the economic difficulties of the last couple years, these challenges are pushing IT in some profoundly new directions, according to research firm Gartner, which said the result is a notable swing toward cloud-based services that's expected to fuel unprecedented growth in cloud computing over the next several years.
Organizations should start experimenting with Web apps from Google, Microsoft and other software companies.
Open-source middleware maker WSO2 has launched an open source cloud platform that should be of interest to enterprise Java developers. Called Stratos, it's a fully hosted application platform-as-a-service (PaaS) for building and deploying apps and services "with instant provisioning of enterprise servers, including the portal, enterprise service bus (ESB) and application server."
The real innovation in higher education IT is not the technology itself. This may seem obvious now, but it wasn't in the past. It's a recent revelation that comes with changes in the roles of IT staff and faculty in innovation with technology for teaching and learning and in IT organizations and departments on campus.
In an era when Google ranks almost daily as the most-visited website in the world, the question has to arise for any higher education institution: Why create digital repositories?