CT Briefs

• 09/01/07

:: NEWS

CAPITAL PROJECTS ON THE SAME PAGE. The University of Minnesota is boosting efficiency through a capital project management strategy using software from Skire. The university’s Capital Planning and Project Management department, which oversees $250 million in capital projects annually, is using Skire Unifier for consistent document management, project cost and funding management, and process automation. The internet-based software can facilitate access by external partners and temporary project managers, as well as departmental staff.

OPEN EXCELLENCE. The University of California-Santa Cruz was named Sun Microsystems’ first OpenSPARC Center of Excellence, establishing a collaborative partnership between Sun and UCSC faculty who work with the OpenSPARC community on the processor code first released as open source by Sun in 2006.

GREAT OPENINGS. Strathmore University in Nairobi, Kenya, became the first institution to go live with the much-anticipated Kuali Financials System this past summer, marking a successful implementation of the first truly missioncritical community source project. The Kenyan university chose the option of commercial support from The rSmart Group. Read more here.

CRADLE TO GRAVE. For the California State University system, student lifecycle management is an enterprise strategy that emphasizes self-service technology functions and targets accelerated time to graduation, and it’s a service that begins with recruitment and goes far beyond graduation. CSU is in the process of implementing Oracle’s PeopleSoft Enterprise Campus Solutions across 23 campuses, initially hoping to address a sluggish graduation rate (in recent years, only 24.5 percent of students made it through to an undergraduate degree in four years). Read more here.

WHO IS WHERE ON THE NETWORK? Coppin State University (MD) now has an automated, centralized view of its network that facilitates both long-term planning and real-time problem solving. The school has deployed eTelemetry’s Locate network appliance, which passively identifies the name and exact location of each user on the network, correlated to the user’s IP address. Coppin State Director of Network Services Thomas Smith says, “Locate gives us these associations in seconds, and we can search historical records as well.” Read more here.

CMS EXTENSION. Northwestern University (IL) has developed an open source file bridge extension to facilitate content exchange between Blackboard and Xythos applications. The new extension has special appeal to those users with archival content in the Xythos system, or who distribute content to multiple course sites. The software is available for free download by colleges and universities. Read more here.

COMPLETE WITH BACHELOR’S. Via a new partnership between Rio Salado College (AZ) and Northcentral University (AZ), students in Rio’s online teacher ed program may now earn a bachelor’s degree by transferring 90 credit hours earned at Rio to Northcentral, then completing the degree with 30 hours from Northcentral, all online.

:: PEOPLE

NEW DSPACE FOUNDATION NAMES EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Michele Kimpton will lead the continuing development of DSpace, an open source platform to store, manage, and distribute collections in digital format. Hewlett-Packard and MIT Libraries jointly developed the platform in 202, and this year announced the formation of the nonprofit DSpace Foundation (over which Kimpton will serve as executive director) to foster further development and adoption. Read more here.