NJCUITMA Meeting

Today I attended a meeting of the New Jersey College and University Information Technology Managers Association (NJCUITMA). The event was hosted at the Middlesex County College. The president of the organization Neil S. Sachnoff is the Executive Director of Information Technology at this school.

After seeing a demo of some of these products during Educause last summer, Neil decided to ask Microsoft to come to one of our meetings and demo three of Microsoft’s “Almost-Free” products. Microsoft sent one of their top guys, a Productivity Advisor by the name of David M. Norris. David’s background in the Microsoft product line was extremely fluent, which was best exemplified by the excellent responses that he provided to questions that were asked by both myself and members of the group. I was extremely impressed with his level of knowledge as well as the enthusiasm he displayed for the products that we looked at.

David first demonstrated Microsoft’s SharePoint Services application. Although I had previously heard about this product, I had never paid much attention to it before today. SharePoint is an extremely powerful collaboration product which has many uses in the educational environment. David showed us how to create a centralized page for managing information and content and demonstrated how SharePoint ties into the Windows Server and Exchange environment. A central page can be used for announcements, event listings, online journals, online photo albums, threaded discussion boards and other links. The tool is a free download for Windows 2003 users. The SharePoint Portal (not free) product provides management tools for the Services module along with additional features that the free version does not offer. I was most interested in the Document Library feature which allows for multiple users to work collaboratively from a centralized repository with additional features such as searching, file locks, version control and shadow copy. SharePoint also allows users to incorporate external web site content using a web capture tool or even import RSS feeds.

The second product demonstration was on the Microsoft Producer application. Producer is a really straight forward application that enables a user to easily capture and synchronize audio, video, slides and images which in turn creates rich-media presentations. I had seen this application before but also have not had the chance to play with it that much. The obvious benefit of Producer over strictly using PowerPoint is that it allows you to insert Video and Audio with narration all as one component. With PowerPoint when you use video you are limited to only having video on one slide. The resulting files from Producer are HTML. I will check this out, however I want to spend some time figuring out the best way to create some AVI files from video on DVD that I have. The operation of this is also similar to Microsoft’s Movie Maker application that comes free with Windows XP Professional.

David spent a few minutes reviewing the two Learning Essentials modules for MS Office. There is a module that geared for teachers and one that is geared for students. Most of these tools fit better in the K-12 arena. One neat tool shown was a question generator for creating tests within Word. I was impressed however because it took most of the thought process out of using the tool and allows the creator to focus strictly on the content to be generated. These products are also a free download.

The final package that was demonstrated by David Norris was the Shared Computing Toolkit. This package, also a free download, is an interface for defining local and group policies on workstations. It is very useful when deploying workstations that are intended to be used in a public environment such as in a computer lab or kiosk. The package essentially makes the job of securing a machine and restoring it back to its original state after each use very easy. All of these configurations are possible without the software but you need to know the proper registry hacks or policy configurations to modify. There are additional features such as inactivity timeout and on-demand systems restore which I will look into further.