4/2/2008
Campuses are starting to outsource e-mail services to popular Web 2.0 mail services such as Hotmail, gMail, Yahoo Mail, or others. Will various office functions also be outsourced? How far will outsourcing to the Web go?
4/2/2008
A number of campuses have gone public about upgrades of their PeopleSoft and Oracle applications.
4/1/2008
Missouri's College of the Ozarks has chosen a new document management solution from Perceptive Software to help it transition from paper and manual processes to an electronic document repository. The school, located in Point Lookout, MO, will be implementing Perceptive's ImageNow in its financial aid and admission offices.
3/26/2008
422 Group has released a new version of its software for constituent relationship management (CRM). Built on Microsoft's new Dynamics CRM 4.0 platform, Continuum 422 CRM includes enrollment management analytics, electronic campaign and event management capabilities, and adaptive workflow rules that automate and personalize interaction with higher education communities, including prospects, applicants, enrolled students, alumni and donors.
3/26/2008
A calculation-error bug in Microsoft Office Excel 2003, which was acknowledged by Microsoft last Friday, has been resolved with a security update.
3/25/2008
Microsoft officially launched its latest customer relationship management (CRM) product, Dynamics CRM 4.0, last week. At a well attended event Thursday morning in Huntington Beach, CA, Microsoft focused not on the new features or technical details of the release, but instead characterized the problems of sales teams and the use of CRM systems, which generally have been too complex for the end user.
3/19/2008
Microsoft, famous for its product delays, has taken a different approach with its latest virtualization offering: instead of multiple delays, it's pushing up delivery deadlines.
3/18/2008
Microsoft Tuesday announced the availability of Windows Vista SP1 via Windows Update. The company has also posted the upgrade to its download site. SP1 releases are typical milestones for Microsoft products as many IT shops wait until the first update before deploying. Vista's update comes a little more than a year after its initial release.
3/18/2008
SAS has broadened the availability of SAS OnDemand for Academics, a service that allows faculty and students to integrate advanced data analysis in their teaching and learning activities. Users register for the service, download a SAS software application via the Web, and then perform processing by connecting to a hosted server at SAS.
3/13/2008
In an age of electronic information, it seems obvious--exchange student transcripts electronically, thereby cutting costs, speeding the process, and making fraud more difficult. But in a process that has taken many years, student transcripts are just now being pushed and pulled into the 21st century. Often on a state-by-state basis, high schools and colleges are gradually adopting technologies to allow them to exchange transcripts electronically.
3/6/2008
Social networking sites aren't just for fun. In what may be the future for college recruiting efforts, some 300,000 students now use a social networking site called Zinch specifically to network with colleges. On Zinch, prospective students can enter a personal profile that gives colleges in-depth information well beyond grades and test scores. From the other side, Zinch says that more than 450 colleges and universities are using Zinch as a high-powered recruiting tool.
3/5/2008
rSmart, which makes open source software for education, said it is collaborating with Sun Microsystems to develop Kuali-based programs certified to run on Sun's collection of systems and open source infrastructure software, including Solaris, MySQL, GlassFish, OpenSSO and OpenESB. The first application will be the Kuali Financial System.
3/5/2008
According to blogger Nicholas Carr, Microsoft may be preparing to make a major Software-as-as-Service (SaaS) announcement soon, possibly at its MIX08 conference this week in Las Vegas.
3/4/2008
After nearly three months of private beta testing involving about 100,000 users, Microsoft Office Live Workspace (OLW) is being rolled out worldwide as a full public beta. Previously, participants had to be qualified by Microsoft for the beta; now, as of today, it's open to all comers who wish to create workspaces. Coinciding with the public beta, Microsoft has also revved OLW with new features and enhancements and has kicked off a sweepstakes to build awareness for the service.
3/4/2008
Microsoft last week announced that it would cut the price on Windows Vista. The timing of the price cut would coincide with the retail availability of Vista Service Pack 1.
3/3/2008
Microsoft has announced a new step forward for one of its Software as a Service (SaaS) initiatives, Microsoft Online Services, with online betas of Exchange Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007.
2/29/2008
Lattix this week is offering the latest version of its large-scale management and rearchitecting solution for service-oriented architectures and complex systems. The Andover, Mass.-based company released Lattix 4.0, which provides architects and designers with a high-level abstracted view of system-wide applications.
2/28/2008
Broward Community College in Ft. Lauderdale, FL said it is using business intelligence software from SAS to better manage finances and increase enrollment. With eight campuses, BCC must collect, analyze, and report on financial and student data to justify state funding and compete with other educational institutions.
2/25/2008
The University of Pittsburgh has signed on with Alloy Software to automate technical support across multiple departments. The deal equips the university's Financial Information Systems (FIS) department with Alloy Navigator, which provides a centralized platform for IT service management. It replaces the department's previous home-grown system.
2/22/2008
Education consulting firm ASR Analytics has debuted a new suite of services focused on the reporting and analysis of accountability data in colleges and universities. The new Accountability Framework for Higher Education (AFHE) is designed to provide a "sustainable reporting foundation for decision making" using BI methodologies.
2/21/2008
Concordia University Texas is working with Intelliworks' Orion software service to manage its admissions programs. Concordia said it plans to use the solution to manage online event registration and prospect inquiries, track interactions with prospective students, and create targeted e-mail marketing campaigns.
2/21/2008
Ingres Corp. and Pentaho Corp. formed a partnership this month to address market demands for open source business intelligence (BI) products and services.
2/20/2008
The American University in Dubai has deployed ImageNow, an enterprise document management program from Perceptive Software, to streamline its business processes.
2/19/2008
Both the University of Iowa Foundation and the University of Nebraska Foundation have selected software from Blackbaud to manage their respective fundraising efforts.
2/13/2008
As part of its five-year, $200 million Banner enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation, the University of Illinois said it will deploy Progress SonicMQ to handle enterprise messaging. SonicMQ acts as middleware for transaction messages.