If you wish to participate, please email Anne (aknowles@middlebury.edu). Maximum 12 participants. Please identify yourself as faculty or staff, as we are aiming for a balance across the range of interests on campus.

Update on the College’s United Way Campaign

• We had have 134 contributors so far
• 18 are  first-time contributors
• 66 have increased their contribution from last year
• 37 met the 125% challenge by increasing their contribution by 25% this year
• We have raised over $89,000 so far, with a goal of hitting $125,000 and to also top last year’s number of contributors, which was 194.

Thank you for considering contributing.

Live United!

Mike Roy, on behalf of the College United Way Committee

We’ve just posted the LIS Quarterly Update for your reading pleasure. We’ve shrunk it down (it’s a mere 11 pages!) and generally re-organized it to make it easier to skim quickly. As always, I would love to hear more about how we can make this report useful as a communication and planning tool, and also what we can do to make the process of producing it as simple as possible.

We’ve just launched an on-line discussion board at http://go.middlebury.edu/discuss  . The goal of this project is to find out whether or not an on-line forum will meet a need on campus that is presently not being met by Facebook, Midd Confessional, and Twitter on the one hand, and MiddNotes, the Campus Events Calendar, and the Portal on the other.

The discussion board is a very simple utility where you can post a topic, respond to a topic, and respond to a response. You can add profile information about yourself, including an image, and links to your on-line persona. We’ve created a thread to discuss the discussion board, and hope that students will take time to let us know whether or not this effort will address some of the gaps they have described in the communication platforms currently on offer at the College.

An FAQ on the details of how the forum works is available for those who want to learn more about how to post.

1. SunGard understands Banner better than anyone in the world, and we will be able to benefit from this expertise as we manage the application, and perform upgrades.
2. The data center where Banner will reside is a world-class facility that will provide us with a level of protection, security, and up-time that is a major improvement over how we manage Banner today.
3. SunGard provides a disaster-recovery facility where we can recover should their primary data center fail.

This change will have only minimal impact on campus. For the most part, users of Banner will notice no real differences. GO shortcuts will remain the same and will point users to the new Banner hosted servers. As we go through the migration of the system from our facility to the SunGard facility, we will at some point have to freeze all development efforts for a period of about 6 weeks. This is currently scheduled for the October – November time frame. Functional areas are already planning around this schedule with the understanding that any patches required for regulatory compliance or tax updates will be granted an exception. Once the migration is complete, we will be back in business and able to continue with our development efforts.

The timeline for this project is as follows:

• from now until October: LIS is working with SunGard to establish the hosting environment
• November: Testing of the new installation will be done by administrative offices
• Mid-December: Go live on the new system

We feel confident that this decision will improve the performance and reliability of this critical system, and will allow us to focus our precious human resources on Middlebury-specific issues, as we no longer have to spend time thinking about the system optimization, back-ups, and other critical but aspects of running this system. While this may seem like a radical move, it is in fact part of an on-going trend in Information Technology in Higher Education, as schools leverage the power of the Internet, the cloud, and hosting services to provide improved services to their campus.