Chief Information Officer and Executive Director of IT

Director’s Update

As of April 30, 2010

Prepared by: Stephen A. Vieira

Chief Information Officer and Executive Director of IT

Security Awareness:

Every month this newsletter will lead with a security tip for you to use at work or at home. Most of what will be offered can be found at the National Institute of Standards and Technology Information Technology Laboratory web site (http://csrc.nist.gov/). This ongoing series will take into account two basic questions: “What behavior do we want to reinforce?” which suggests aspects of awareness that need to be shared and ‘What skill or skills do we want the audience to learn and apply?” leading to training and education. The real key to information security is you!

Only through understanding the threats and issues can you protect yourself while using technology. There are safe and secure methods of using technology that are practiced every day without incident. Hopefully this collection of monthly tips will allow you to use technology appropriately with the proper degree of care and caution.

Let’s start with something you’ve heard hundreds of times. The most common form of attack on your computer, and one which can be easily defended against, comes from viruses, worms or Trojans. An unprotected computer without the latest operating system and security patches or upgrades is a prime target. Neglecting this aspect of your computer’s safeguards is an open invitation to problems and infection. Keeping your computer under an anti-virus umbrella is simple. At CCRI, everyone is entitled to run a free copy of Sophos Endpoint Security and Control on their home computers based upon the licensing agreement that has been established through IT. Get your free copy of Sophos for home at the Help Desk or IT areas on each of the campuses. There are also free anti-virus programs (AVG Free http://free.avg.com/us-en/homepage, avast http://www.avast.com/free-antivirus-download to name just a couple) that offer appropriate protection at no cost. Any of these programs should be set to automatically download patches and upgrades to the computer as soon as they are available from the vendor.

Without some form of anti-virus protection, all levels of havoc could occur including taking over your computer, stealing information from you or waiting for a specific time to establish your computer as a virus distributor to others on your network. If you’re not going to use an anti-virus program, the simplest, yet most unacceptable, means of avoiding infection is to disconnect from the Internet and don’t install any new software or files on your computer. Naturally this is not a viable option for most of us and so ensuring that our anti-virus program is constantly at its latest level and is upgrading when patches are available is our best safeguard. Today’s tip is simple! Make sure that you have a fully functioning anti-virus program and that it is continually receiving the latest patches.

Now three more quick tips!

1. Please remember that IT at CCRI will never, ever ask you for your username and password. That information is stored in our secure systems and so there would never be a need for anyone from IT to request that of you. If you ever receive an email or a verbal request from IT at CCRI for that information, please ignore the request and refuse that information.

2. When making a transaction on a secure web site, the best way to ensure that you are indeed connected to that web site is to click on the lock in the URL location box in your browser. The information displayed should prove that you are connected to the site that you desire. If you see anything but what you would expect, log out of the site immediately. This description from a security certification company describes how secure connections are made and how they encrypt messages transmitted.

3. When leaving your computer, ALWAYS use the keyboard combination of to lock your computer while you are away. This ensures that no one will do anything on your computer while you are away. And when you get back, it is easy enough to type in your password again to get right back where you left your computer desktop.

Next month a discussion about passwords!

Academic Initiatives:

Virtual Desktop is coming!

In 2011, the Community College of Rhode Island will explore a pilot to bring “virtual desktops” to its computing labs. This initiative has many benefits and provides a future of greater customer service expedited by the fact that this technology eliminates much of the hands-on and site visits necessary with desktop replacements and maintenance.

So what is “virtual desktop” and how does it improve service? Virtual desktop, also known as VDI, provides every person on campus with a custom-designed, role-based computing template of all the software they will need without the hardware to with it. Imagine a desktop where you would have a keyboard, mouse and monitor and nothing else. A small box, called either a “thin client” or “zero client” would establish a network connection to a large server based in the machine room in IT. Based upon who you are and what role you fill, when you logged in, you would have all the software you would need to accomplish every task before you. You would log in like you do today but instead of turning on a computer, you simply start working, opening up programs and proceeding.

So what else goes away? With VDI, there are no “blue screens of death”, no virus issues, no need to replace hard drives or problems with your computer. Instead of getting a desktop replacement every few years, your virtual environment would change as your needs changed. Behind the scenes adjustments could be made almost instantly to needed software and upgrades of existing software. No more waiting for someone to come to your desk to fix anything since it all gets done in the “private cloud” of virtual desktops at CCRI.

Microsoft Live at EDU update!

After a couple of hiccups that caused some head-scratching and email inadvertently being place in Junk folders, IT has successfully provisioned over 50,000 student email accounts to Microsoft Live@edu also known as Outlook Live.

This highly successful transition of student email, starting on August 16, 2010 and continuing as new students are accepted at the college, has been seamless and cost-effective. The amount of maintenance that IT dedicates to these email accounts is minimal and the benefits for students are huge. Those tools that students are familiar with through the instructional process and available in the academic computing labs (Word, Excel, and PowerPoint) are at their fingertips from their log in location. Additionally, secure storage capacity where classroom assignments or projects can be stored and shared with other students or faculty is a feature that CCRI could not possibly provide for our student population.

Outlook Live meets the high student expectations of “always-on” systems that are available when they want to use them. Reliable, accessible and dependable, Microsoft Live@edu has been a move in the right “cloud” direction for CCRI and its students.

Blackboard here to stay! WebCT going away!

Transitioning from one learning management system to another is never easy. Over the last year, IT has assisted and provided instruction and advisement to many faculty members making this jump in technology. The feature-rich, but in some cases rigid, Blackboard 9.1 toolset has afforded some challenges and at the same time opportunities for IT and its academic support members, Mary Adele Combe, Kyle Jackson, Gene Grande, Norm Grant and Dan Persaud.

In November of 2010, the application servers became taxed by the number of students taking tests at the same moment. A previous, hardware assessment engagement with Blackboard didn’t indicate that any such problem would occur. Rather than point fingers, Adam Paul from the Infrastructure group, devised a method of load-balancing and maximizing the front end systems supporting Blackboard to ensure that our systems could handle hundreds of simultaneous users. His work over the semester break in December and January provides an entirely new, highly-available system for all users.

However, this month during testing Blackboard again experienced a slowdown of the systems causing an interruption once again in the first day of extensive testing of final exams. During the semester, there were multiple times when over 1,000 users were on the system successfully and without interruption. Never had the systems supported that large a number of people attempting to take tests simultaneously and this became a root cause of that slowdown. In the aftermath of that slowdown and with as much haste as possible, a collective membership of IT put together an immediate and well-thought-out plan for that evening to upgrade the existing hardware and change some parameters to ensure that testing success would occur the next day.

Through this effort, the remaining final exam testing on Blackboard was entirely successful without incident. Moving forward, IT will be developing further plans and working with faculty members to thoroughly test additional models for providing additional resources to this essential service. Through research and testing this summer, IT will build a fault-tolerant system that will withstand the utilization needs of the growing number of Blackboard users.

Also a reminder that Blackboard summer workshops for faculty members are being offered in order to support the creation and enhancement of fall Blackboard courses. Blackboard workshop descriptions, schedule and registration are published at: http://it.ccri.edu/Training/BbTraining.shtml.

You can also make an appointment for a one-on-one consultation with Instructional Technology staff in the CIT on your campus: http://it.ccri.edu/instructech.

It is particularly important that faculty members teaching courses with WebCT begin building their courses in Blackboard for the fall 2011 semester. WebCT has reached its end of life and will no longer be supported at CCRI starting this summer semester, May 23, 2011. You will continue to have uninterrupted access to your WebCT courses and course content, but new students will not receive WebCT accounts and will not have access to WebCT. All students will have access to any courses you make available on the Blackboard platform.

Collaborative technology suites…students supporting students

Dreams come true at CCRI. For several years Linda Richard, Director of Instructional Technology and Media Services, had a well-developed plan for introducing a site at every campus where students could collaborate on projects and presentations using the same technology offered in the classroom. In her mind, this would be a location that fostered teamwork, innovation and an opportunity to learn about and practice use of tools to support the work done in the classroom. These suites would bring together a collection of devices that students could get their hands on, experiment with and use to develop skills they could demonstrate actively as part of the learning process.

On December 1, 2010, the new Collaborative Technology Suites at the Knight Campus (room 6530) and Flanagan Campus (room 2602) were opened for student use. Some of the technologies available at those locations include PC and Mac computers and laptops with MS Office 2007, DVD/VCR recorders, a document camera/visual presenter, the sympodium interactive writing display, a projection system with a whiteboard surface for interactivity, a Flip video camera, a flatbed scanner, MS Moviemaker, Adobe Photoshop Suite (Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Fireworks, Flash, InDesign), Audacity and Jing. Additional iMacs and editing software are scheduled to arrive in 2011.

Similar rooms are planned for the coming semesters in both the Liston and Newport Campuses. Linda’s vision of a place that meets the needs of students working on group projects has come to life. Instruction is available for students who book the room for their group’s use. Support for the suites comes primarily from the division of Instructional Technology and Media Services. The active engagement of students in this highly-interactive environment is encouraged and welcome. Continuous communication about these spaces will increase usage and fulfill a growing need for student support for the use of technology.

Windows 7 implementation and Office 2010 Rollout

In the summer of 2010, IT upgraded nearly all computing lab and classroom computers to the Microsoft Windows 7 environment, with a few exceptions made for classroom programs that could not properly function with that operating system. All computers currently in the desktop replacement process support Windows 7 and its increased security enhancements. Many features of Windows 7 have been covered in previous versions of this newsletter.

Microsoft Office 2010 differs from Office 2007 in a few subtle ways. Office 2010 has a new ribbon which provides a better organization of commands in a tab format. All the functionality of Office 2007, and all its products, still exists. Several new features enhance the old system. All Office 2010 programs include a built-in PDF writer to help you save documents into the PDF format with a click. Earlier, you had to download an add-on separately but now PDF creation is included. PowerPoint 2010 has some new powerful video editing possibilities for those you want to integrate into your presentation. PowerPoint also allows you to convert your presentation into a video file that you can share or load to YouTube. All Office 2010 programs now have screen clipping capabilities to help you quickly capture any area of the desktop screen. The tool automatically takes screenshots of all open applications on your desktop and you can insert them into your document or presentation.