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Features
2006 Campus Technology Innovators: Campus Infrastructure
7/22/2006
KOGUT AT UC-MERCED: Go for
open-standards-based solutions, wherever possible.
Challenge Met
University of California-Merced, the first new UC campus in nearly 40 years, opened its doors to students in fall 2005. CIO Rich Kogut and his IT staff worked on the site for more than two years prior to welcoming the initial student population of about 1,000. Building a brand-new campus infrastructure from the ground up presented an opportunity to incorporate best practices across the board. But the process was not without challenges, given the magnitude of the project, set in the resource-constrained environment of a university system faced with spiraling costs and persistent growth. How would the institution’s IT leaders provide the services that faculty and students expect immediately, while continuing to build out a major research university destined to grow to an enrollment of 25,000 over time?
Kogut and his colleagues responded with a highly flexible, scalable, manageable, and particularly user-centric infrastructure.
How They Did It
Planning for growth and change, these IT leaders have adopted an architecture that allows them to add, upgrade, and replace functionality without a domino effect. Toward that end, and to avoid vendor lock-in, they implemented open standards-based infrastructure and applications wherever possible. For major technology components such as networks, directories, and e-mail, they only accepted RFP submissions based on non-proprietary solutions and features.
UC-Merced uses a single ID/password and a universal portal. The school went with an open source portal solution, JA-SIG’s uPortal, to make it easier to implement a vast array of applications over time. Unicon provided key assistance in configuring and deploying uPortal.
The campus employs many vendors and technology solutions, including telecommunications from AT&T; networking from Extreme Networks; Cisco Systems’ wireless solution; servers and directory, e-mail, and identity management solutions from Sun Microsystems; Oracle’s calendaring and database solutions; Sakai’s collaboration and learning environment; and open source support from rSmart.
