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Administrative/Business Apps

The ePortfolio Hijacked

12/12/2007

The idea of the electronic portfolio in higher education in the US has transmuted from a focus on learning to a focus on accountability. Trent Batson hopes to clarify the difference between the terms "ePortfolio" and "assessment management system."

Microsoft Releases Office 2007 Service Pack 1 Early

12/12/2007

A year after its initial release, Microsoft this week announced it is shipping the first Service Pack for Office 2007. Office System Service Pack 1, originally expected in early 2008, improves stability, performance, and security, according to Office product manager Reed Shaffner.

Roxbury CC Looks To Boost Enrollment with Portal Solution

12/11/2007

Roxbury Community College is beefing up its enrollment and constituent relationship management efforts. The college, located in Roxbury Crossing, near Boston, has signed on to use portal and CRM solutions from Jenzabar, as well as the Informz Text Messaging solution.

Sapient Unveils ALM Solution

12/10/2007

Sapient released an agile application lifecycle management (ALM) platform designed to help organizations plan projects, manage change and collaborate. The latest version of the company's ALM software, called ResultSpace, has moved from being an internal Sapient solution to being a generally available product.

Survey: Higher Ed Marketers To Increase Online Budgets

12/7/2007

Are higher education marketers doing enough online? A new survey conducted by EducationDynamics (formerly Halyard Education Partners) suggests not. While marketers cite favorable results from online lead generation campaigns, few are allocating significant portions of their marketing budgets to online media. However, this may be changing in the coming year.

Windows Server 2008, Vista SP1 Hit RC Milestone

12/7/2007

Microsoft Wednesday continued its hand in hand development of Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista's first service pack, publishing release candidates (RC) for each product. The big updates in Windows 2008 RC1 revolve around enhancements to Group Policy, a management framework first introduced in Windows 2000 Server. Group Policy Preferences, as it has been renamed, was formerly known as PolicyMaker Standard Edition and Policy Share Manager.

FileMaker Pro Expands Leopard Support

12/6/2007

FileMaker has released interim updates for its FileMaker Pro and FileMaker Pro Advanced database solutions. The new versions sport expanded compatibility for Mac OS X 10.5 ("Leopard") and for the software's Web publishing features.

Sapient Unveils Application Lifecycle Management Solution

12/6/2007

Sapient has released an agile application lifecycle management (ALM) platform designed to help organizations plan projects, manage change, and collaborate. The latest version of the company's ALM software, called ResultSpace, has moved from being an internal Sapient solution to being a generally available product.

Colleges Look Outside for IT Management

12/5/2007

Three North American colleges have signed on with CampusWorks to supply IT personnel, management, and strategic planning. Through the deals, CampusWorks will supply the colleges with everything from a CIO to planning for technological investments using its "Learner-Centered Technology Management Co-Source Model."

Cornell Deploys Web-Based Data Viz Solution

12/5/2007

Cornell University, Ithaca, NY, is deploying new data visualization and analysis tools for its Key Performance Indicators (KPI) initiative, a project that will be used to "assess the present state of business, measure performance and progress toward goals, and inform decisions on future courses of action," according to the university.

University of Pennsylvania Library Serves Up Live, Chat-Based Help

12/5/2007

Catering to the way students communicate, more and more university libraries are providing instant live chat services to users who need help while accessing the library over the Internet. For example, a chat screen may pop up when an online patron clicks on a Help tab from the library's main page. A librarian then corresponds via chat to answer the patron's question.

Jenzabar ERP Expands Student Management, Financial Aid Functionality

12/4/2007

Jenzabar this week released an update to its Jenzabar EX enterprise resource planning solution. The new 2.7 update, which shipped Monday, adds "significant" enhancements to two of the suite's modules, according to the company, and incorporates various other improvements throughout.

Coconino Outsources CIO, IT Development

11/29/2007

Coconino Community College in Arizona has signed a five-year deal with information technology management firm CampusWorks, which will supply the college with a CIO and various technical personnel to oversee IT staff development.

Feeling Smart at Nova Southeastern

11/28/2007

A new "Shark Card" has been issued to more than 25,000 students, faculty, and staff at Nova Southeastern University incorporating both contact and RFID-enabled smart chips, plus biometrics.

Snapshot: Academic Services Spending To Reach $1.2 Billion

11/26/2007

Composed of professional services such as those supporting online education and faculty recruitment that help institutions support teaching and learning objectives, the academic services market is serving key postsecondary priorities.

First Look: DB4Objects Database

11/26/2007

As a freelancer, I've had to work with databases quite often. In my earlier years, I worked with Microsoft Access, creating Visual Basic for Applications forms to interact with my data tables and queries. As my needs matured, I moved on and embraced MySQL and the various front ends for it due to the increased versatility offered by such solutions.

Continuing Education Sites Lacking, Researchers Say

11/20/2007

Continuing and professional education (CPE) sites are somewhat effective at helping students with their enrollment decisions, but they're lacking in some key functionality areas: content, search capabilities, and multimedia. In the second of its three-part series of research reports, "Optimizing School Web Sites as a Marketing and Recruitment Tool," education consultancy Eduventures found that prospective continuing education students in large part think these sites come up short in areas they consider crucial and made specific recommendations for the types of content that should be added to these sites to boost their effectiveness.

Emergency Notification: Penn State Stays on Message

11/15/2007

With 80,000 students and 24 campuses across a state that's intimately familiar with inclement weather, Pennsylvania State University clearly needs a reliable--and redundant--system of emergency notification.

The Potato Made Me Do It

11/14/2007

A leading open source proponent explains why he says the characteristics institutions reward will be "replicated in the DNA of software companies."

CU Swaps SIS, Opts for Oracle

11/14/2007

As part of a system-wide migration of administrative technologies, the University of Colorado (CU) is switching out its current student information system in favor of an Oracle solution and also adopting Oracle SOA Suite to build a service-oriented architecture in an effort to improve IT efficiency. According to CIBER Enterprise Solutions, which worked with Oracle Consulting on the project, this marks one of the first implementations of the Oracle SOA Suite in higher education.

Harris Debuts HC2.Open APIs for Constituent Relations

11/13/2007

CRM solutions provider Harris Connect has debuted HC2.Open, a set of APIs and extensions for Harris clients providing integration with social networking sites and offering enhanced constituent profile management capabilities.

Snapshot: Campus Infrastructure Computing Market

11/12/2007

The infrastructure computing market is composed of technologies that support the collection and interconnection of computer, voice, video, and data, including the security and storage of information.

IBM To Nab BI Tech Firm Cognos

11/12/2007

IBM said today it's entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Cognos, a firm that provides business intelligence technologies to K-12 and higher education and other sectors. The deal is still dependent on shareholder and regulatory approval and other conditions but is expected to close in the first quarter of 2008 and is valued at about $5 billion.

A Plan for Maximum Participation in Campus-Based Text-Messaging Alert Systems

11/8/2007

How do you get students (and others) to opt in to text-messaging campus alert systems, such as the one used to good effect earlier this semester at the University of Colorado? Once they've opted in, how do you capture their attention and get them to keep your system loaded with their current information?

Snapshot: Functionality Preferences for Admissions Portals

11/5/2007

Professional Web designers are skillful in creating integrated sites that make use of a range of technical functions, such as virtual tours, online chats and podcast downloads, as well as informational formats, including text, graphics, pictures, and so on. Eduventures explores what preferences prospective students have around these functions and formats.