CT Briefs
:: 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.
RSMART AND KUALI pros at Nairobi’s Strathmore U.
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
Michele Kimpton
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.