Information Technology Forum

Campus Wireless and Bite-Sized SOA - July 29th 2009

IT Training Vendor

Mike Caudle, Employee Development Coordinator for CIS, presented on St. Edwards University, the new IT Training vendor. St. Edwards can provide a wide array of IT Technical training. Classroom training is offered in Austin or College Station, and online training is provided by webcasts and E-learning. St. Edwards has provided Web Portal for Texas A&M at www.seupec.com/tamu/. The Texas A&M Account Manager is Mike Strange. He will act as primary contact, evaluate our needs and seek to ensure that the needed training is available.

Code Maroon

Allison Oslund, Communications Manager for Texas A&M IT discussed Code Maroon Registration. Registration for the new code maroon system is now available at codemaroon.tamu.edu. Alerts from the new system will begin September 1st. Anyone with a NetID can sign up for SMS alerts. Registration cannot be transferred from the old system to the new system; you must enroll in the new system to receive SMS alerts after August 31st.

Campus Wireless Update:

Rob Brenner and Justin Hao from the Network Engineering Team presented about current TAMULink coverage, and the deployment of 802.11n. Currently, TAMULink covers about 5,650,000 sq ft. including 165 buildings and 79% of registrar-controlled classrooms. 16,000 unique users access TAMULink each day. Wireless coverage and reliability will continue to improve with the introduction of 802.11n for campus deployment. 802.11n supports speeds of up to 300 mbps and uses a three antenna design for increased performance and reliability. The office of the president is offering 66% fund matching for 802.11n deployment. These funds are limited and offered on a first come, first serve basis. Requests for 802.11n should be submitted to request@tamu.edu.

Bite-Sized SOA

Jamie Horgan, Principle Consultent for NeuDesic, presented on lessons learned when using Service Oriented Architectures. He began with a description of a service application and then discussed the development process for a service oriented architecture. In closing he provided many tips for SOA projects including:
  1. Start small; avoid mission critical projects for SOA pilots.
  2. Use SOA to solve business problems, not IT problems.
  3. Create and maintain a reference architecture.

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