CITC News

MMS and CSS move to CITC

UNT's Microcomputer Maintenance Shop and Classroom Support Services have moved to the Computing and Information Technology Center.

Finding Your Way Around: Computing Resources at UNT

Welcome, or welcome back, to UNT! If you're new, or if you've just been away for awhile, it is our hope that this article will serve as a handy starting point to get you acquainted (or re-acquainted) with the resources that are available to you here at the University. Students, faculty and/or staff members should all benefit from the information that follows.

When all else fails ...

If you have a computing question and/or problem and can't think of who to contact or where to look for a solution, just remember this: Contact the Helpdesk.

The Computing and Information Technology Center (CITC) Helpdesk is located in room 119 of the Information Sciences Building (ISB), directly beside the Science and Technology Library. Their hours are listed on the Helpdesk website:

http://www.unt.edu/helpdesk.

Besides stopping by or searching for answers on the website, you can call the Helpdesk at 940-565-2324 or send mail to helpdesk@unt.edu.

Speaking of the Helpdesk, Benchmarks Online, publishes a column each month called "Helpdesk FYI." This month's article isActivating Your EUID account Following is a list of articles published this year. Perhaps one of these topics is something you've been wondering about:

New students are probably familiar with the Tour of Student Computing Services at UNT. There are lots of topics touched on that are of interest to non-students also. Check out the website: http://www.unt.edu/helpdesk/studenttour/

General Access Labs

The UNT General Access Computer Lab System is a collection of 14 computer labs spread across the UNT Denton campus, with one lab in Dallas. They have been set up to provide computing to the University community. The GAL website states:

The labs are intended to meet the general academic computing needs of UNT students. These labs are supported and maintained primarily through a portion of the Technology Use Fee.

Students with a valid UNT photo ID card may use any General Access Lab except where noted.

A list of labs and their locations and operating hours is available from the GAL website. The lab in ISB 110 is an Adaptive Lab. As the website states:

The University of North Texas Academic Computing Services General Access Lab is located in the Science and Technology Library in ISB 110. The mission of this lab is to provide general services to the UNT community with an emphasis on the special features that Academic Computing Services has to offer including helpdesk support and research assistance. Additionally the ACS lab is the designated adaptive lab on campus providing state-of-the-art adaptive equipment for those who need it. For more information about adaptive services on the UNT campus visit the Office of Disability Accommodation at http://www.unt.edu/oda.

Computer Based Training

All current faculty, staff, and students at UNT are eligible to use the computer-based training (CBT) courses purchased and administered by the CITC. The CBT homepage is:

http://www.unt.edu/cbt/

Following are some Benchmarks Online articles that have been published in the recent past on the topic:

This issue of Benchmarks Online has the article Office 2007 Training Available at the SkillPort
CBT Website.

Online Learning/UNTeCampus

For students, a good starting place is found on the student tour. Faculty will want to visit the Center for Distributed Learning website and/or the Center itself. Some recent Benchmarks Online articles of interest to faculty are:

Windows Vista/Office 2007

Everyone's wondering about Windows Vista and Office 2007 these days. The following Benchmarks Online articles have addressed various aspects of this topic:

As mentioned above, this issue of Benchmarks Online has the article Office 2007 Training Available at the SkillPort CBT Website.

Other Items of Interest

  • Gartner Research -- UNT students, faculty, and staff have access to Gartner Research at: https://gartner.unt.edu/ CITC also sponsors direct access to Gartner researchers. For more information see
    Getting Direct Access to Gartner Researchers    .
     
  • Statistical and Research Support Services -- "The mission of the Research and Statistical Support (RSS) group at the University of North Texas (UNT) is to facilitate access to current research tools and statistical methodologies and to promote these methods to the research, instructional, and administrative communities at UNT; to encourage a collaborative research environment for researchers through the development and use of innovative computing technologies; to provide training and consultation in the appropriate use of  statistical methodologies and computer software; and to facilitate access to data collection and data management technologies." [From the Research and Statistical Support website]. The RSS Group publishes a monthly column in Benchmarks Online. This month's column is: Equivalence Tests.
  • High-Performance Computing Initiative - "Academic Computing Services supports multiple clusters of 32 and 64-bit processor systems running Linux for compute-intensive scientific research. Cluster computing provides dedicated systems for concurrent processing of jobs in a batch environment."
     
  • Information Security -- "The UNT Information Security Team's purpose is to provide support to University academic and administrative departments for the protection of UNT computing information resources from misuse, abuse, unauthorized access or unauthorized disclosure. Computing information resources include all equipment, facilities, software, data and procedures which are designed, built, operated and maintained to collect, record, process, store, retrieve, display and transmit information. The mission of the Information Security Team is to educate and assist administrators and users of the UNT computing community in assessing, implementing, and maintaining their information security needs." [From the Information Security Website]. InHouse, UNT's faculty/staff online newsletter, recently ran a series of articles on information security. You can review them here: InHouse Series on Information Security.

Microsoft Exchange/Outlook Migration Delayed

UNT had planned to migrate its faculty/staff e-mail system from Novell GroupWise to Microsoft’s Exchange e-mail server and Outlook client starting in the summer of 2007 and finishing early in October. However, that migration has been indefinitely postponed because of technical difficulties that the Computing and Information Technology Center has experienced in implementing Microsoft’s products.

A rather aggressive and optimistic schedule had called for the Exchange and Active Directory (Microsoft’s required directory service) servers to be operational by late July 2007. Although Active Directory is essentially ready for production at this time (August 20, 2007) a series of hardware and software tuning issues has prevented the CITC from completing the Exchange server rollout. Issues such as ascertaining just what performance metrics the new servers had to meet, what settings of the storage interface should be applied, and similar highly detailed yet critical issues caused each stage of the setup of Exchange to fall behind the original schedule.

Because the CITC has already announced two delays in the rollout of Exchange, we don’t want to further inconvenience UNT’s e-mail user community by giving another completion date of the Exchange rollout that it may not meet because of continuing technical difficulties. While the CITC is confident that it can and will get Exchange running and that the Exchange/Outlook e-mail system will be superior to GroupWise, the CITC has decided to get the new e-mail system operational and fully tested before announcing a new implementation date.

Faculty and staff will continue to use GroupWise, which remains fully operational, until the Exchange service is rolled-out.

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