Information Technology News

Conference Calls with UCI Phones

Conference calls make a cost-effective alternative to traveling to meetings.  UCI’s phone system supports conference calls for 3 to 8 people, including up to 6 off-campus participants.  For larger groups, commercial options such as QWEST are available.

For faculty and staff with a Cisco IP phone, even more flexibility is available with “meet me” conference calling.  This kind of conference call can support up to 16 users, any number of which can be off campus.  Once one or more parties have joined the call, the originator can leave the conference without disruption.  However, since this requires a special-purpose extension to be reserved for the conference, please call Telephone Customer Service (x4-5123) at least a day in advance.

Phone conferences can be enhanced with tools that allow on-line sharing of documents and desktops.  A systemwide agreement has recently been concluded with ReadyTalk, and other products are on the way.

Mobile Devices Connect to Enterprise Services

The campus wireless network has enabled mobile computing for laptop and tablet computers for years.  Faculty and staff may be less aware that NACS also offers services to users of handheld mobile devices such as iPhones and Blackberries.

If you use Oracle Calendar to manage your appointments, NACS offers support for wireless synchronization so you can carry your calendar with you.  Oracle Calendar offers two methods for synchronizing a personal digital assistant, Desktop Calendar Sync (for PDAs) or Mobile Data Sync (for smartphones and cell phones.)  These methods are mutually exclusive, and should not be intermingled.

For users of NACS’s Exchange server, you can get access to your email via Blackberry by using Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) for Exchange.  BES is a “push” technology meaning the Exchange server will update your Blackberry whenever new data (email, events) is delivered to your account.

If you need help with these resources, or have other ideas how NACS can support mobile devices and technologies, please call x4-2222 or email nacs@uci.edu.

More Space on Webfiles

Webfiles is a campus filesharing service available to faculty, staff, and graduate students.  Using a simple Web interface, users can upload files to be shared and specify a wide variety of access restrictions, specifying individuals or groups, number of allowed accesses, or a time window of accessibility.  NACS offers quarterly classes in the use of Webfiles.

NACS has recently doubled the disk space available to users from 1 gigabyte (Gb) to 2Gb.  More information on the use of Webfiles can be found online.

PSearch: NACS and ICS Collaborate

Faculty and staff now have a powerful new tool for finding contacts through UCI’s online phone directory.  PSearch melds the directory data NACS maintains with state-of-the-art database research from the lab of ICS Professor Chen Li.

PSearch allows users to enter whatever information they may happen to have (first name, last name, department, phone number, etc.) and PSearch will offer any entries in the campus phone directory which match.  PSearch is error tolerant (you can find people with only an approximation of the spelling of a name) and real time (results are displayed and refined as you enter information.)

PSearch represents a collaboration between NACS and ICS.  Professor Li’s team offered the intelligent database search technology, and NACS offered the data and our user-interface experience.  Key contributors on Professor Li’s team include PhD student Rares Vernica at UCI and Guoliang Li, a visiting researcher from Tsinghua University, China.

PSearch is only one potential use of Dr. Li’s “type-ahead search” technology featured on his TASTIER project web page.  Future uses may involve other campus-wide or even UC-wide data sets.  This new technology makes it possible to simultaneously support full-text (google), quick-link, and directory searches in a single query as exhibited by the search box on the ICS home page.

Application Development for DUE

The mission of the DUE-IT Application and Database Development Team within NACS is to build and support applications and databases for the Division of Undergraduate Education. One such program is Student Academic Advancement Services (SAAS). SAAS works to increase the academic success of key student populations and receives funding from the US Department of Education (USED).  Accordingly, it has considerable data collection and reporting requirements.

NACS has helped SAAS staff to consolidate nearly a decade’s worth of program data by building a new Microsoft ASP.NET application to collect and track how students utilize SAAS services, by recruiting a student reporting specialist, and by providing extensive support in its annual reporting efforts. The Director of SAAS, Joe Maestas, had this to say about NACS’s assistance with last year’s federal reporting efforts:

I was extemely pleased with the ease and professionalism that the folks at NACS handled a very difficult and complex task.  Our reporting requirement to the USED is a monstrous task which has always caused us problems due to the size and complexity of the database and report requirements.  After John and Kenny’s help I no longer worry about getting it done.  We now get this baby put to bed early, and we are notified that there is no need for corrections. Makes us look good with the USED folks.

The new ASP.NET-based Student Tracking system supplanted a less cohesive array of Microsoft Access, Excel, and paper-based data-collection tools, eliminated duplication of effort in data collection, and improved the quality of collected data by adding a layer of data validation that did not exist beforehand.