St. Cloud State keeps up the pressure.The pace of technology on college and university campuses is by any standard remarkable, but users' expectations continue to push the tech limits to even higher levels of efficiency and sophistication--almost all of it behind the scenes. "Most of what is going on at campuses is transparent to students and faculty," says St. Cloud State University (MN) Director of IT Services Phil Thorson. In fact, Thorson anticipates student, faculty and administration pressures for high tech solutions. But since the completion of an enterprise-wide upgrade with an integrated solution of HP StorageWorks HP StorageWorks is an HP Portfolio of storage products, including online storage, nearline storage, storage networking , archiving, and storage software. The product line up includes: Disk arrays The most recent successful application is SCSU'S Campus Desktop which allows a student to log on to any computer that supports Campus Desktop and have their personal desktop contents, personal application settings, access to the Outlook email program See e-mail program. , and automatic access to a campus-wide network personal file space and Web space. "The goal is to provide students with a collection of services available through a roaming The ability to use a communications device such as a cellphone or PDA and be able to move from one cell or access point to another without losing the connection. profile process," he says, "that allows students to move from computer to computer and have personal settings applied, retain personal browser browser Software that allows a computer user to find and view information on the Internet. The first text-based browser for the World Wide Web became available in 1991; Web use expanded rapidly after the release in 1993 of a browser called Mosaic, which used favorites and bookmarks, spell-check dictionaries, layout-window placements, customized menus, and commands." The service provided to the campus under the umbrella of technology services is called HuskyNet. Campus Desktop offers, he adds, a "real-world" environment for personal computing Refers to users working on their own computers rather than a terminal to a mainframe. Sometimes, the term refers to using computers at home for work and/or entertainment in contrast to business use only. See personal computer. and instruction, a flexible computing computing - computer environment in labs and on public access machines through the login Signing in and gaining access to a network server, Web server or other computer system. The process (the noun) is a "login" or "logon," while the act of doing it (the verb) is to "log in" or to "log on. system using a HuskyNet ID and password. Thorson depended on his vendors throughout the process, he says, "Because I didn't have millions of dollars budgeted for consultants and I primarily needed engineering assistance and design experts who knew their equipment. HP knew all of that, as well as enterprise-wide problems and solutions. We have 32 buildings and 16,000 students and I needed a resource that's been there, done that." |
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