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Student Information at Risk in SunGard Laptop Theft

4/24/2008

The State University of New York (SUNY) at Brockport has learned reported that a laptop belonging to an employee at SunGard Higher Education, a software company that provides IT services to the university system, was reported stolen March 13. The school learned about the theft April 14 and received copies of the compromised files April 17.

Students Attempt To Give Up Technology for a Week and Mostly Fail

4/24/2008

A professor at the University of Central Florida challenged her students to unplug and live a technology-free life for five days, and most discovered they were incapable of doing so. "It's something I'm doing to get us in touch with where our humanity is," said faculty member Mary Ann Murdoch in coverage in the Orlando-Sentinel. "Are they really in charge of these devices, or are all these devices in charge of them?"

Johns Hopkins Goes Mobile on uPortal

4/23/2008

Johns Hopkins University has chosen Unicon to develop and deploy the school's new mobility theme based on uPortal, the open source enterprise portal for higher education. The mobility theme is designed to enhance the functionality and content of Johns Hopkins' campus portal to make it accessible by mobile devices such as cell phones, smartphones, and PDAs.

NASA Gets Serious about Educational Gaming

4/23/2008

NASA this week moved a step closer to branching into educational gaming. The agency presented its vision of a science education-focused massively multiplayer online game to more than 200 potential software development partners in a workshop Monday sponsored by NASA Learning Technologies, an educational technology incubator project.

Texas A&M University Stays in Touch with Constituents with CRM Software

4/23/2008

The George Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M University has gone public with plans to use Talisma constituent relationship management software. The school said it hopes to apply the software to the job of multi-department data and interaction management for student recruitment and retention.

U Wyoming Adopts Emergency Alerts

4/23/2008

The University of Wyoming has selected Rave Alert as its platform for sending emergency notifications to its campus community. Before buying the solution, the school did two tests of service. According to a statement by the company, in the second campus-wide test, 7,000 students, faculty and staff members received a text message on their cell phones. Of the students polled, nine out of 10 reported receiving the text messages within one minute; the longest wait was up to four minutes.

Stanford U Prof Gets ACM-Infosys Award in Computing Sciences

4/23/2008

Infosys Technologies and the Association for Computing Machinery have given the first ACM-Infosys Foundation Award in Computing Sciences to Daphne Koller, Ph.D., a leading researcher and student mentor at Stanford University.

Students Get Taste of Real-life Cyber Defense in National Championship

4/22/2008

Texas A&M University looked to defend its National Champions title against five teams at the National Collegiate Cyber Defense Competition (NCCDC) this weekend but lost out to Baker College of Flint, MI. The third-annual NCCDC was hosted by the University of Texas at San Antonio's Center for Infrastructure Assurance and Security (CIAS), a cyber security education and research center.

Conference Focuses on 'The Mobile Future'

4/22/2008

Carnegie Mellon University's West Coast Campus and UC Berkeley's Fisher IT Center at the Haas School of Business partnered to hold a conference Tuesday of this week in Santa Clara, CA, on "The Mobile Future: Technology Revolutionizing Our Lives." CT talked with James H. Morris, dean of CMU West and a professor of computer science, about the unique conference that brings together both academics and industry leaders.

Publishers Sue Georgia State over Digital Distribution

4/22/2008

A group of publishers has filed suit in federal court to stop what it calls "widespread copyright infringement" at Georgia State University (GSU). The complaint, filed by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, and SAGE Publications and supported by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), charges that GSU administrators are violating the law by systematically enabling professors to provide students with digital copies of copyrighted course readings without publisher authorization.

Microsoft Investigating LocalSystem Access Bug

4/22/2008

Security personnel in Redmond are investigating a newly reported zero-day bug vulnerability in Microsoft operating systems and server systems. The bug, disclosed Thursday by Bill Sisk, security response communications manager for Microsoft, allows escalation of privilege to occur for authenticated users under specific conditions.

Project Albany Moves into Google Turf

4/22/2008

Microsoft revealed Friday that its code-named "Albany" project is a consumer-oriented hosted service that provides Excel, PowerPoint, and Word applications, as well as security and collaboration tools.

Sanyo Expands T-Series Projector Line

4/22/2008

Sanyo has introduced two new models in its "T" series of high-brightness, portable multimedia LCD projectors, including the high-end SXGA+ PLC-ET30L and the entry-level XGA-resolution PLC-XT21/L. Both are shipping this month.

Northwestern U Puts Kronos Workforce Central To Work

4/21/2008

Northwestern University has selected the Workforce Central suite from Kronos to manage employee hours and costs. Like many universities, the school has a complex workforce that includes a large number of student employees working at its campuses in Chicago and Evanston, IL. The software will also track absenteeism for the university's 10,000-plus employees, including absences that qualify under the Family and Medical Leave Act (FMLA).

New Web Service Helps International Students Make School Payments

4/21/2008

Custom House, a foreign exchange and international payments company, has launched a new international service to help universities and colleges accept payment from international students.

Michigan State University Automates Capital Project Management

4/21/2008

Michigan State University (MSU) has implemented with a new internal capital project management application. Skire Unifier provides collaboration mechanisms and control and visibility into individual capital projects and across a school's project and facilities portfolio. MSU eventually intends to extend the implementation to its IT and facilities management organizations in subsequent phases of the deployment.

Virtual Security Gets a Boost

4/21/2008

How secure is your virtual environment? Recent US-CERT Cyber Security Bulletins list several vulnerabilities for versions of software from VMware that allow attackers to cause denial of service attacks, generate buffer overflows, expose password logging and gain unauthorized privileges that can be used to hijack processes. The exposures have been addressed in patches by the company, but concern has been growing that virtual machines may get less security-related attention from IT staff than physical boxes.

SQL Server 2005 SP3 Expected in Summer '08

4/18/2008

Microsoft this week announced through two blogs that it plans to release the next service pack to SQL Server 2005, Service Pack 3 (SP3). The release is timed for the third quarter of this year, or after Microsoft releases SQL Server 2008 to manufacturing.

Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition Adds Role-based Security Admin, Sheet Integration

4/18/2008

Software developer Zoho this week released Zoho CRM Enterprise Edition, an expanded version of the company's Web-based constituent relationship management solution and part of its Business Applications set.

BizTalk RFID Mobile Unveiled

4/18/2008

Microsoft Thursday described its new platform to help developers more easily create mobile applications that make use of radiofrequency identification (RFID) technology. The company unveiled BizTalk RFID Mobile, a solution designed to work with Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2 and other Microsoft products.

U Miami: Stolen Back-up Data 'Unlikely' To Be Misused

4/17/2008

The University of Miami reported Thursday that computer back-up tapes containing personal information from some 2.1 million patients were stolen from a third-party storage facility in March. The university said it's confident that the information on those tapes is inaccessible to the thieves but is notifying patients anyway.

Brigham Young University in Idaho Moves to Jenzabar for ERP

4/17/2008

Brigham Young University - Idaho (BYU - Idaho) has selected Jenzabar's Total Campus Management enterprise resource planning (ERP) software. The suite the school will use includes Jenzabar CX, Jenzabar's Internet Campus Solution (JICS) and the Jenzabar Non-Traditional System (Jenzabar NTS).

Imagine Cup '08 Heads to Los Angeles

4/17/2008

American college and university students will have a chance next week to show off their technology skills as the U.S. finals for Microsoft's 2008 Imagine Cup head for Los Angeles. More than 16,000 students from 125 campuses in the United States registered for this year's event, in which they compete in categories ranging from software development to interface design. Winners will have a chance to go on to Paris this summer for the global finals, facing the best from 100 countries.

Vista SP1 Expands Language Support but Hits USB Snag

4/17/2008

As of Tuesday, Vista Service Pack 1 is now generally available in all 36 supported languages. Microsoft had initially rolled out Vista SP1 in just five languages.

Louisiana Campuses Sign on for Emergency Alerts

4/17/2008

Omnilert, which sells the e2Campus emergency notification system, said it has sold its services to several Louisiana colleges and universities in recent months. The company also recently posted a discount pricing structure to the Louisiana state contract system, which allows schools in the contract system to purchase the service without going through a bid process.