The university began the process of updating its entire wireless network to a system that is potentially five times as fast as the current one.

The change is part of a number of updates Information Technology and Services completed over the summer in an effort to ease Internet accessibility and provide better services for students.

MySlice received an aesthetic touch-up, as did ITS’ website. In addition, ITS’ website became the first SU website to have a mobile phone-specific version of its page. It also completed a wiki page that started last year to give students a community resource for technology-related issues.

Wireless network

The first phase of a multi-thousand dollar wireless network upgrade was completed this summer, as South Campus and a couple of academic buildings were equipped with the latest in wireless network technology, said Peter Morrissey, director of networking.

The new network, technically called 802.11n, will be between three to five times faster than SU’s current wireless system, depending on the machine used to access the network.

Though the faster technology has existed for a few years, SU held off on the update until the technology was ‘mature,’ Morrissey said.

‘We were waiting for the vendors to go through a few iterations of it to make sure it was stable,’ he said. ‘The other issue was in order to take advantage of it, the users and the different laptops that get on the network — that has to also have the capability, and initially, not many of them had it anyway.’

The first phase focused on the areas of campus most in need of an upgrade, he said. South Campus had spotty coverage on the old network, and the academic buildings that were upgraded, such as Smith Hall, had no wireless access before.

‘As far as we can tell, it’s working very well,’ he said of the completed installations.

All Mac laptops support the new network. PC users will have to purchase higher-end models in at least the $600 to $700 range to take advantage of the faster network speed, though they will still be able to access the network as it is still compatible with older models, Morrissey said.

North Campus residence halls will be equipped with the new wireless system throughout the academic year beginning this fall semester and should be completed by the end of next summer. The rest of the academic buildings could take a few years to finish upgrading, Morrissey said.

Morrissey said ITS is not anticipating any difficulties updating the residence halls and that there should be little to no network disruptions during the process.

Answers wiki

ITS will provide answers to common technology questions, as well as a range of other topics of interest, through a new website similar to Wikipedia called Answers.syr.edu.

‘It’s really just trying to build communities, online communities, that share information or share knowledge,’ said Jenny Gluck, director of Academic Applications and Service Centers. ‘It’s a dynamic place that has changing content that is authored by the community.’

The website was initially launched a year ago, but the summer saw upgrades to include information verified by ITS professionals, as well as the ability to create private pages.

In addition to community authored and edited pages, the Answers wiki includes what Gluck called ‘gold’ pages that are authored by ITS professionals and include tips for technological problems that have been used and verified, such as how to connect an iPad to the SU network.

Though the focus of Answers is currently technology, the topics could cover anything community members desire, Gluck said.

Popularity of Answers is slowly growing, Gluck said, and the library and students in the College of Law and the School of Information Studies currently use the website the most.

‘We really just want more students to use it,’ she said. ‘My goal is to really make it the how-to place for Syracuse University.’

MySlice

MySlice, students’ self-service portal, was redesigned to match SU’s main website and provide more ways in which students can help themselves.

The changes, implemented June 13, but planned for six months prior, were sparked by the need to upgrade the application that runs the site.

‘Our applications are only supported by our vendors for a certain year period, and then we run out of support,’ said Erik Anderson, director of ITS’ Enterprise Technology Group. ‘So if we don’t upgrade to the next version, we end up on an unsupported version and that causes more trouble.’

Thus far, ITS has received positive feedback on the changes, Anderson said, with reactions saying the website is warmer and friendlier.

Though mostly an aesthetic update, the changes also laid the groundwork for future updates to functionality and features, which Anderson said is an ongoing, unending project. ITS is currently reaching out to student groups and administrative groups to determine what additions people think MySlice needs.

Some new features have already been added, such as ways to get financial aid information and more details on classes.

‘Self-servicing is the main focus from the administrative side to help with the students’ experience,’ Anderson said. ‘The other side, the student groups, we’re still working with them to define their priorities and initiatives.’

Website redesign

ITS completed the first phase of an overhaul to its website, cutting down the number of pages and adapting the template of SU’s other webpages. Along with the redesign came the creation of a mobile phone-accessible version of the site, the first at SU.

Prior to implementing the changes, ITS planned the redesign for three months, said Cindy Barry, ITS’ webmaster. The complete overhaul is expected to be completed by the end of December.

Because there are many components to the site — the completed site will include a few hundred of ITS’ original 8,000 web pages — and because ITS is comprised of approximately 10 different units, it decided to break the process into phases, Barry said.

In the first phase, the look of the website was changed to that of other SU webpages. ITS also switched the program it uses to manage information on the site so that it does not need to rewrite the same information multiple times for different subpages of the website.

Accessibility to ITS’ website will be easier with the addition of a mobile version of the site, Barry said. Over the course of last year, ITS saw an increase in the amount of traffic coming from mobile users each month.

‘We figured because we’re ITS, we should have a mobile site,’ Barry said. ‘We wanted to make our site mobile because a lot of the computing devises that come in aren’t just PCs and Macs anymore.’

Other updates

* AirOrange, SU’s wireless network, now offers unsecured guest access on a temporary basis. Guests can be self-sponsored or sponsored by a student, faculty or staff member.

* Windows 7, Microsoft’s latest operating system released in October, and Microsoft Office 2010 are now available on all public PC labs.

rhkheel@syr.edu

Published on September 1, 2010 at 12:00 pm