This upgrade to the Google-powered UW Search page will enable searches to include sites in other UW domains (like uwmedicine.org and uwnews.org) as well as sites within the washington.edu domain. The upgrade will use the newly released Google Co-op search.
The upgrade is in progress and anticipated release is before the end of March, 2007. C&C is partnering with Media Relations in this effort.
C&C staff working on this are Melody Winkle and Frank Fujimoto.
Emerging Technology is coordinating the plan for a C&C Management Review of projects, scheduled for June 5, 2007.
The Management Review is the first step towards a C&C product and service planning process.
Update - The first Management Review was successfuly held on 07 July, leading to the instigation of regular quarterly reviews.
UW Departmental Calendars can be established by campus departments to publish their departmental events. The calendars are customized to include a departmental logo or image, and can be accessed by anyone at all or, if desired, limited to anyone with a UW NetID.
Update - Departmental Calendars were released on 04 October.
Amazon has recently made available online storage (Amazon S3) and virtualized computing services (Amazon EC2). It is likely that these services will be of interest for a variety of services at the UW, particularly perhaps in the research community. This project, which we hope to start in the third quarter of this year, will explore establishing a business relationship between the UW and Amazon that would allow UW faculty and staff to configure and pay for these services using UW budgets directly, making it easier to utilize and configure these services for projects where computing and storage requirements can change rapidly, but that might not warrant building physical and support infrastructure for local computing at the UW.
Update 01 November 2007 - Investigation into these products revealed minimal interest in the UW community at present, and conversations with Amazon did not lead to any clear role for central services in providing these services to the UW. No further work on this project is ongoing, though we'll continue to monitor interest and new services.
Apple's iTunes U program provides a university-branded space where institutional content can live. That content can then be accessed using Apple's popular iTunes software for Windows and Mac desktops. Note: This program does not provide access to music distribution from record labels, videos, or any other content from the general iTunes store.
iTunes U includes both a public side, with content available to any iTunes user on the Internet, and a private side, where authentication and authorization can be enforced, a prime example being limiting access to course materials to students enrolled in the course. The authentication and authorization schemes used are proprietary Apple protocols.
Several UW academic units (including Nursing, Public Affairs and others) are very interested in using iTunes as an access method to rich media content. UW Media Relations is interested in using iTunes as a means of publicizing the UW.
The academic calendar is a driving force for implementation dates for this project. The current hope is to have initial implementation ready for content population during the summer, with public release before the start of Autumn Quarter, 2007
C&C staff working on this project include Tony Chang, Bill Corrigan, and Bill Schaefer. This project will require some integration time from the Distributed Systems middleware group, though that may not be necessary for initial implementation of the public (non-authenticated) side.
Update 2007 October - The public side is now live. We are waiting on the private side for evidence of demand and to see Apple make progress on implementing Shibboleth for authentication.
There is widespread dissatisfaction with the current MyUW.net services offered to alumni by C&C. Both Google and Microsoft have introduced services for universities that offer email and other online services to alumni, students, and employees for no charge to the institution (revenue is derived from targeted advertising, though both services are willing to turn off the ads for current students).
The Alumni and Development units are very interested in pursuing an outsourced solution for email and online services for alumni. Several other UW academic units are interested in pursuing these outsourced solutions for current students, and perhaps for employees as well.
This project is scoped to provide an outsourced alumni service to be available when C&C expires the accounts of students graduating this spring - this expiration typically happens two weeks into Autumn Quarter. The first phase of this project, currently underway, is designed to evaluate the two competing product lines and to produce a recommendation and project plan for moving forward. We anticipate this phase being complete by the end of March, 2007.
Update 2007 November - The UW is moving forward to implement Microsoft's Exchange Labs service for Alumni. More info on Exchange Labs is available here.
Refresh the layout and style of MyUW to make access to the most frequently used services easier. Released 29 August.
Publicly release the specifications for publishing RSS and dynamic channels in MyUW. We hope this will encourage more UW units to add content into the UW portal.
Update 31 December 2007 - Dynamic channel specs are published at: http://webservices.washington.edu/docs/MyUWPersonalizedChannel.html.
Enhance the MyUW calendar to expose URLs that allow calendar software (including Outlook, Apple's iCal, and Google Calendar) to subscribe to MyUW calendars.
eTech is staffing the Collaboration Tools Strategy Task Force appointed by the Provost. The task force's charge is to assess the current landscape of online collaborative tools and recommend an institutional strategy that supports interdisciplinary and multi-departmental efforts at the UW. The task force is to report to the TACs by the end of the 2007/2008 academic year. Erik Lundberg and Dinah Walters are co-facilitating this Task Force.
eTech staff (primarily Tony Chang) are participating with OIM staff to define a pilot project for Services Oriented Architecture at the UW. Scott Stephenson from OIM is the lead on this project.
Getting some knowledge of and engagement with the UW research community is desired by C&C leadership. This effort is being led by Louis Fox, with eTech participation.
eTech is participating in the teams working on UW Exchange and Sharepoint implementation. These teams are being led by C&C Service Delivery and Support.