Date:    July 6, 2004

To:       Tony Ferrara, Vice President for Administration

From:   Mark Reed, Associate Vice President for Computing

Re:       Annual Report 2004

It is with great pleasure that I provide you with a list of Computing Services and Educational Communications Center (CSET) accomplishments for academic year 2004. 

The services provided by CSET have become critical to the everyday life of our campus community, so much so that CSET is a key partner in the success of a great many departments and of individual students, faculty and staff on campus.  Consider the following. 

CSET operates the University's network, mainframe and central servers 24 hours per day, 7 days per week, 365 days per year, and provides many other services, from PC repair to management of the pods to programming support to documentation, directly to users.  During each average school day our machines run thousands of jobs for thousands of people using computers, while the network moves more than a terabyte of information and our email servers process more than 150,000 email messages.  On an annual basis, the helpdesk answers more than 12,000 calls for help, our training center provides more than 1,000 individual training sessions, and EdComm satisfies almost 6,000 equipment requests in addition to supporting all the equipment in classrooms, which are used throughout the day.  At the same time, the 411 machines in our pods are in constant use, offering more than 100 software packages on each machine and printing some 5.5 million pages per year for students.  On the administrative side, almost 13,000 students register, check grades, verify financial aid status and pay their bills through our systems. Staff, likewise, handle the University's admissions inquiries, purchase requisitions and the University's student aid, housing and HR transactions through the same systems. CSET is truly a prodigious enterprise upon which our community depends!

On the attached pages are detailed the activities of the past year which required significant effort and bring significant value to the University.  Still, this list of projects completed doesn't tell the whole story of impact.  This year, our efforts continued to gain recognition as Binghamton moved up to 70^th in the rankings of Forbes "Most Wired" campuses in the nation, no small achievement with over 3,000 institutions of higher education in the running.  At the same time, we were ranked 41^st on Intel's list of "Most Unwired" campuses, certifying the University's leadership in the use of wireless technologies.  This recognition helps keep Binghamton in front of the national audience of potential students and their families, as well as of potential sponsors of research. 

Especially important was our success in bringing more resources and information to the fingertips of our students, faculty and staff.  Enhancements include the upgrade of Backboard hardware and software, which will bring better performance and function to faculty and student users, the opening of DARS on-line, which gives students a tool to verify and model course requirements against their program goals, the Statmart machine upgrade which gives more capacity to researchers using our commercial databases, and the upgrade of our Oracle applications to 11i, which brings the latest tools to users of our human resources and financial systems.

Other significant value was delivered to the campus through changes made to the campus email system to allow emailing to targeted groups on campus as a means of replacing costly paper mailings for official correspondence, and our continued success in fending off the major negative effects of viruses and worms which have at times crippled other organizations.

The staff of Computing Services and EdComm have accomplished much and provided enormous value to the University in 2004.  Our goals for 2005 are likewise aggressive. 

First, our goal is to maintain what we have in place and ensure constantly-improving reliability for current users.  A sample of this year's reliability projects includes the following.

• Email:  While the potential benefits of moving "official campus communications" to email are great, heavy use of our email system and the attacks on email by hackers trying to proliferate malicious software present a challenge to our system, much of which is cobbled together from free software.  We will emphasize consolidation, standardization, reliability and security in this environment. 
• Peer-to-peer software use by students continues to challenge our network capacity and our sense of what's appropriate.  We have plans to upgrade our "second level" network switches to relieve capacity problems, and also install software that will require all students to authenticate to the network, verify that they understand the "acceptable use" policies, and scan their machines for appropriate anti-virus protection.  This should provide better performance, help curb inappropriate use, and make the network less vulnerable to attack. 

Second, our goal is to develop services that can provide new and more productive ways of working for students, faculty and staff.  The "Information Commons" and "Student Success Center" are two initiatives begun in 2004 that should bear fruit in 2005.

• The Information Commons is a joint project by Computing Services and the University Library to move the South Pod from the Engineering building and recreate it in new form in the Library, managing it in a way that combines the information content and access specialties of both organizations to the benefit of students. 
• The Student Success Center is a joint venture by CSET's Technology Training Center, the Center for Learning & Teaching, Career Center, Writing Center, and multiple international student offices to provide improved instructional support for all students, coupled with pedagogical and technical support for faculty and graduate students.
• ACET:  The Academic Computing & Educational Technology Committee continues to guide CSET in setting priorities for academic IT support.  Major areas of emphasis are instructional technology and research support, with a pilot project in classroom response systems planned this year.
• AISRC:  The Administrative Information Systems Resource Committee has been formed to review and advise on how information systems priorities related to business processes are set at the University.  We expect that at least one priority to come from that committee will be to overhaul or replace our current student systems.

Third, in an age of growing vandalism, we are forced to move aggressively to protect the information assets of the University.  This year will see several initiatives to increase information security and reduce the vulnerability of our network, servers and desktop machines to intrusion.

All these projects, accomplished and planned, and the daily background operations of CSET are the work of the staff of Computing Services and the EdComm Center.  They have performed admirably, and at times, heroically, in keeping these critical systems up and running and available.  I hope you will join me in extending our thanks to them for a job very well done.

cc:        Provost Swain

            CSET Staff