Upgrades for Free

We have a small supply of 17" monitors available. If you are still using a 15" monitor, we'll be glad to provide you with a used 17" CRT monitor instead. Just call the Helpdesk at 41950 and place a work order (while supplies last).

Personal Purchases

Apple is offering discounts to students, staff, and faculty at SHSU for personal purchases. The University Apple representative is now working with us to provide a customized web site for our campus. Check back at the Computer Services web site; it'll be posted soon.

As we mentioned last month, Dell is also offering special pricing for the Sam Houston community.

Media Circus

Thanks to all the people that assisted with the Academic Instructional Technology and Distance Learning-sponsored show on the 29th. This collaboration involved several academic and administrative departments. Lots of interesting capabilities are now available for faculty use in the classroom and in research.

One of the new gadgets demonstrated at the Circus was a USB Memory Stick, also called a Flash Drive. They can replace your floppy disks in PCs or Macintoshes. Memory Sticks are cheaper than adding Zip drives and CDRW's. The sticks vary in size with storage for up to one gigabyte of data at this time. The costs vary and in fact are changing daily! However, as an estimate, they are $40 for 64 mb and $75 for 128mb. If you'd like to order some for your department, just let the Helpdesk know, and we'll get a current quote for the size and quantity that you want.

We'd like to announce the ten winners of the Memory Stick door prizes. They are: John Swartz, Bill Bridges, Mary Ellen Sims, Gary Smith, Bill Fleming, Barbara Polnick, Joe James, Ann Holder, Hadley Leavell, and Gerald Kohers. Congrats to these individuals! To our winners: just call the Helpdesk at 41950 to schedule a time for us to deliver your Memory Stick. We'll be glad to show you some of the tips for using them at that time.

PDF Printing

If you are printing files from Nell, you should now be getting e-mails notifying you when they are completed and available for PDF viewing. No more old-fashioned greenbar printouts that you have to walk through rain or shine to pick up in AB1.

If you want to return to the location of your files, and you don't have the URL, you can still easily find the Web page. From the University Web site, click Intranet and SamWeb. If you'd like to know more about SamWeb, we're offering a special training class on May 7th at 2 p.m. You may sign up now.

Training

Special recognition goes to Lisa Teague from the Cashier's Office and Carla Vasquez from TRIES. Since January 2003, Lisa has passed 20 Mindleaders courses and Carla has passed 18. It's very difficult at times to stay motivated to improve and enhance work skills and abilities. Congrats to these two for their accomplishments.

If you haven't checked out the Mindleaders course catalog lately, look again. Classes range from PCs for Dummies to Interview Skills. The University Computer Services department will pay your annual subscription to sign up for these courses. You can take these courses from home or work---anywhere you can access the Internet. So sign up to learn something to help you here on campus, and also have access to Estate Planning or Investing Fundamentals classes too.

Blackboard

When finals come to an end and your students leave for the first summer break, we will begin moving to Blackboard 6.0 with the changeover completed before the Fall semester. This process will involve running a Blackboard test server so we can work out any kinks that might come along before the Fall semester. Many of you have already expressed interest in working with 6.0 during our testing/development phase this summer.

Because we are making this move from 5.6 to 6.0 we moved the old 5.5 version of Blackboard to our original “prehistoric” server. We will completely shut down 5.5 (also known as blackboard9.shsu.edu) by the end of May. So if any of you have old classes you need archived from that system, tell Jacob Spradlin as soon as possible. Some Correspondence users are still using 5.5 for their Bb courses. We will create special temp courses upon request for those users on the current Bb to prevent valuable data loss.

In August we will be hosting two “Getting to know Blackboard 6.0” days (refreshments will be provided) where we will demonstrate the enhanced new features in Bb 6.

Classroom Security

The purpose of the University firewall is to keep hackers out and our University information safe and private. As promised long ago (like years!), we have now moved the classroom connections behind the University firewall. We apologize that we did not re-notify you recently before we made these changes in your buildings.

In order to login through the firewall, your workstation must be specially configured---similar to the configuration for wireless access. Once the connection has been configured on your PC/laptop, it's just a simple click away. At login, check the small box beneath the username and password which says, "Connect using dial-up networking". This will utilize the VPN connection, and automatically log you in as usual. If you need assistance, just notify the Helpdesk at 41950.

The S: Drives

During the past month, we experienced a number of brief downtimes with our S: drives. We realize how critical this storage space is to you, as well as the reliance placed on it by our students. We have now purchased and installed a new system. The SHSU S: drive server has been upgraded and has a lot more room.

All student quotas were increased from 20mb's to 70mb's. If students exceed the 70mb's, they will receive a warning each time at login, and have five days to get back under the 70mb's before being locked out of their S: drives. We have doubled the absolute limit and made it 80mb's. If students exceed the absolute limit, they will be locked out of their S: drive immediately. If faculty members request additional space for a specific student's project, we will increase the space on a per user basis.

Faculty and staff quotas were also increased accordingly. However, as many of you may have already concluded, we do not lock you out of your accounts---even if you exceed your quota for a long time. So this just eliminates that recurring warning that you're over your quota! A more advantageous benefit of the expanded S: drives for you may be the decreased time necessary for logging off.

Security

To ensure the campus network is as secure as possible, it's essential that we know who has wireless access points in departments or offices. Please help us determine where official University devices are located. We need to verify that they are securely set up behind the firewall.The use of Apple Airports is a particular concern. Please contact the Helpdesk if you are using any of these devices---and you have not previously registered with us.

Windows XP

The January Update mentioned this---but we'd just like to add this reminder. In the interim before Summer I, we will be converting all the University general access computer labs over to Windows XP.