2003 was not an easy year for IT professionals anywhere, and that includes those of us at the University of Washington. This year was, at least from my perspective, characterized by several themes - security issues, communication, tools for managing the digital world, and collaborative activities.
As the year ends, I'd like to comment on some of these activities that I think are particularly meaningful as indications of these themes. This is by no means an exhaustive list of activities that folks in C&C Client Services and colleagues have been involved in, but those that come to mind as the year draws to a close.
During 2003 we fully felt the impacts of having realized, to a large extent, the vision of a worldwide information infrastructure. The perhaps inevitable downside of having created such a widely used information utility is that it has attracted its share of antisocial human behavior. This year we saw spam grow to make up almost half of the email volume at the University and we dealt with thousands of compromised desktop and server systems on campus.
It is perhaps a testimony to our innate optimism that the huge security issues that consumed so much of our attention and energy this year came as the surprise to users that they did. It became painfully obvious that we are all paying the huge price for Microsoft's refusal to have taken Internet security seriously in their desktop operating systems until it was too late, despite the many warnings from around the industry from such luminaries as Terry Gray, among others.
One lesson we can all learn here is the extreme difficulty of recovering from past failures when there is a huge and largely uncontrolled installed base. Microsoft's history of prioritizing features and user convenience over security has led to what Terry has called the "end of the open Internet" this year. The paramount need to carefully consider security aspects in the basic design of all networked services has become all too apparent this year. We in C&C have long been proponents of serious security architecture. The establishment this year of the Security Middleware team managed by Lori Stevens and staffed by a baker's dozen of folks reassigned from other C&C duties speaks to the priority that security infrastructure has assumed within our lives.
We can also be very proud of the work done by all of the C&C staff in responding to the massive security events during the last half of this past year. The Security Operations team this year took on a life of its own separate from Client Services, and they, along with the folks in the NOC, the Client Services Desktop team, Student Tech Support, and the computing lab staff from Educational Partnerships and Learning Technologies, have put in countless long hours in helping people deal with the results of attacks on poorly protected systems on the UW network. The quick responses at the beginning of the school year in organizing the Computer Vets service and in repositioning the UWICK as free software that helped people cope with security issues were major factors in helping our community cope with these widespread problems. In fact the mean time to answer online questions submitted through help@cac was significantly lower this calendar year than in any year since we started recording this data in 1996.
The ongoing security issues have made it clear to many people at the UW that it is imperative that desktop computers be managed in a professional and continuous fashion, and that it is not trivial to accomplish that management. We are seeing a heightened interest in the Nebula program for managing desktop computing in many environments throughout the institution. It is likely that we will see new Nebula customers in the coming year in sectors that have not traditionally relied on C&C to manage their computing environments. The wonderful quality of support work that our Nebula support and engineering teams have provided to our current customers have laid the groundwork for the anticipated growth in the program into the future.
One off the biggest local developments this year was the launch of a new set of committees to advise C&C and the University on IT issues. The University Technology Advisory Committee (U-TAC), the Information Technology Advisory Committee (I-TAC) and the Academic Technology Advisory Committee (A-TAC) are all now officially constituted and meeting regularly to consider issues of concern to the institution as a whole relating to IT and how to set our priorities in a time of increased demand far in excess of available resources. I think we can look forward to the work these committees will be doing in the coming year.
There are several other formal efforts that are demonstrating a renewed attention to communication on the part of C&C, in addition to the plethora of informal channels. Mike Eisenberg, Dean of the Information School, has pulled together a group of deans and IT managers from the smaller colleges to explore issues around sharing of IT resources among those colleges, involving C&C as appropriate. This has turned out to be a good forum for discussion of several major issues of concern to these schools, such as calendaring and student and academic information management.
The C&C Directors have instituted regular meetings with the Deans of all of the UW's Colleges this year, and that will continue in the coming year.
The institution-wide group of Computing Directors has also met regularly over this past year and has shared information about many issues of common interest.
The regular email publication of the OnTech news has also proven to be a good vehicle for communicating with the campus on ways to use IT within the institution.
The continuing challenge of finding ways of providing timely and comprehensible information on service outages is evidence that there are still communications which our user communities would like to see from us that are not easy to provide. This will continue to be a focus of effort in the coming year.
In a slightly different vein, our effort to maintain communication with former UW students through MyUW.net has grown substantially over the past year - as the year ends we have more than 700 paid subscribers to the full service, and over 7,000 subscribers to the complementary service. We'll be continuing to develop this service in the coming year.
At the UW people are increasingly keeping most of their work product online, and managing the artifacts of that work is an issue of growing importance. This year saw us make some substantial progress on this issue, and these are, I think, leading indicators of work that will be done in this arena in the coming year.
Managing disk space and living within the (arguably generous) quota of disk space provided by C&C has long been a problem for many people at the UW. The development and implementation of the diskspace tool has given people an easy way to see how much space files and email folders are taking up, using just a web browser.
The release of the second version of the Catalyst Portfolio built on the success of the original tool in providing a new user interface for managing and sharing digital artifacts. The widespread adoption of Portfolio by the Freshman Interest Group program was built upon this year by its adoption by the School of Medicine.
In the coming year we can expect to see new versions of some of the Catalyst tools, further progress on the disk space management tool, and the rollout of the Digital Well, which will provide a whole new system for storing and managing collections of complex digital objects including streaming media files. In addition, we hope to make some progress on defining new ways of integrating lots of web-based applications together into a more coherent whole, in a project that is being dubbed the Integrated Collaborative Environment (ICE).
The growing adoption of Web Pine is a testament to the extent to which people really have come to depend on the web browser as their preferred way of interacting with networked services, even when that interface may not provide as much functionality as others that are available. The continued divergence of support for standards within the major browsers and the widely-rumored plan by Microsoft to not distribute a standalone browser for Windows in the future are indicative that there are still challenges in the web-browser world to deal with.
This past year also saw continued progress on the migration of UW administrative work to the web environment. This work is making a real difference in enhancing the productivity of faculty, staff, and students at the UW in substantive ways. The Project Consulting group within Client Services is playing an important role in this work. The coming year will see this work continue, and the migration into the .NET development environment for these projects.
2003 saw progress on several major collaborations. The UW and C&C played a very important role in several Internet 2 projects that are defining important standards for interoperating in new ways, including security middleware projects such as Shibboleth and WebISO and video middleware.
The Digital Learning Commons, a major effort to get digital learning materials into middle and high schools around Washington state, was launched in its initial phase this past fall. The DLC is now up and running in eighteen schools around the state. Several classes in these schools are using the Catalyst web tools to provide an online supplement to in-class learning.
The DLC is just one of several institutions showing interest in using the Catalyst tools. 2003 saw a succesful demonstration of the use of the Catalyst Portfolio tool at Washington State University, and as the year closes, plans are underway for further pilot projects with the Stanford Medical School and North Seattle Community College. The issues surrounding authentication and authorization for these users and providing user support for them are of course bright on the radar screen.
As the user communities we deal with become larger and more diffuse, providing UW NetIDs for people at the edges of the institution and beyond has become a significant issue. While we are trying hard to integrate the services we provide people across all of the contexts in which we know an individual, this effort runs into the increasing (and understandable) reticence of people to provide private identification information such as Social Security Numbers. We hope to make some progress on providing NetIDs to specific populations with less sensitive identifying information in the coming year.
C&C, along with all of the other member institutions of the Common Solutions Group, is collaborating with the Open Source Applications Foundation to develop Chandler, an open source personal information manager that hopes to bring a new level of desktop integration of calendaring, email, instant messaging, and other bits of personal information.
One of the characteristics of working in information technology is that every year we make some progress in directions we anticipated but we continue to be surprised by some of the new developments as people think of new and creative ways to use (and sadly, abuse) the technology. This year, the growth of the use of digital media including photography, video, and audio, were long anticipated by many in the field, while the explosive growth of weblogs and other interpersonal communication forms came as something of a surprise.
The new year will undoubtedly be filled with a similar mix of the anticipated and the unexpected, and I look forward to facing the challenges that it brings with all of you.