Anthony Salcito, VP World Wide Education, Microsoft – tonysa@micorosoft.com 617-877-2780

Technology in Education – Expect More

Today’s Challenges

  • attract and retain students, researchers and academics in an increasingly competitive environment
  • student populations are growing and are more diverse, distributed, discerning and price concious
  • limited government funding and tight budgets

Collaborative Campus a vision and an IT architecture designed especially for higher education to establish a relevant, contemporary learning environment. (Microsoft 2011)

Technology Focus Areas

  • Unified Communications
  • Academic Search
  • Education Analytics
  • Virtualization
  • Cloud Services
  • Social Computing
  • Mobility
  • Identity Integration

Anthony did a series of impromptu demos using Office 2010 tools particularly PowerPoint and OneNote (one of my fav apps)

Take a look at the Microsoft Download Centre for the Interactive Classroom.

Office 365 for Education

Office 365 for Education is a replacement of Live@Edu offering. Brings together cloud versions of Microsoft communication and collaboration products  - Office Professional Plus, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online,  Exchange Online and Lync Online.  This is a very interesting option for us if we choose to run our administrative SharePoint in our data centre and leverage the Office 365 cloud service for academic delivery service.  This hybrid option could give us scalability for our large and dynamic academic environment.

We really need to get our heads around what is private and confidential (from a data perspective) and what is not.

Student Readiness Resources – Microsoft is putting lots of focus in this area by providing career roadmaps, student learning plans, IT Academy Student Pass, Dreamspark, Student 2 Business, Imagine Cup, BizSpark, Student Tech Clubs, etc

Partners in Learning – building capacity, growing learning communities, expanding teaching and learning practices.

Take a look at Montage – another Microsoft project, part of fuse labs – http://fuse.microsoft.com/project/Montage.aspx

Another one to look at based on a gaming for learning model Ribbon Hero http://www.officelabs.com/ribbonhero

 

Gene Leganza (@gleganza) VP and Principal Analyst, Forrester Research Inc discusses and presents on Technology Trends.  Gene used the following criteria (Impact, Newness, Complexity) to help describe the trends. In Oct 2010, Gene wrote about the Top 15 Technology Trends on his Forrester blog.  Gene published a table of the top trends here.

On Jan 26, 2011, Gene presented a webinar about his research.  Here are some notes I took:

Theme 1 Empowered Technologies

SaaS and cloud based platforms become standard

  • Customer community platforms integerate with business applications
  • Apps and business processes go mobile
  • Collaboration moves from document centric to people centric

Theme 2 Process Centric Data and Intelligence

  • Next gen BI takes shape
  • IaaS finds a broader audience
  • Master data management matures
  • Analytics target text and social networks

Theme 3 Agile and Fit-to-Purpose Applications

  • Business rules processing move to mainstream
  • BPM will be Web 2.0 enabled
  • Event driven patterns demand attention

Theme 4 Smart Technology Management

  • Systems management enables continued virtualization
  • Client virtualization is ubiquitous
  • IT embraces planning and analytics tools

Recommendations

  • Craft your internal innovation process
  • Integrate your criteria with your business model and priorities
  • Use an annual scan as input to next year’s research agenda
  • Socialize and communicate – create your “technology watch annual report”

Thanks for the insights Gene. I will be looking at our enterprise architecture and see how your themes fit.

One area I would like to comment on in Theme 1 Empowered Technologies.  There is still not enough research and policy work being done on privacy and security for cloud based services.  Influencing governments particularly those outside the United States to modernize their thinking and laws will be a much longer road.  In the meantime, those of us outside the US continue to struggle with the adoption of cloud based services due to things like the Patriot Act and our own privacy laws.

     

    SGHE Summit – Project Horizon Technical Overview – Bob Rullo (@bobrullo)

    * power in Moscone West went out just as Bob started his talk. He did a great job working through his presentation with no slides! Great job, Bob!

    SGHE Summit – Project Horizon Technical Overview

    - needs Oracle 11gR1 database, Oracle Weblogics App Server, Java 6, Grails 1.1
    - moving from Banner INB forms to new Horizon (Aurora UI) architecture
    - need to migrate CRUD and transaction validation, field level validation (UI centric validation)

    Grails Architecture
    - a controller handles requests and talks to services to provide a response (data back to the user)
    - blocks and fields map to the domain model like a row in a relational table
    - field level validation moves to the view as do the canvases and windows – AJAX based

    - leveraging automation techniques – by gathering metadata in the Banner Db and create a domain object
    - can generate 80 to 90% of the domain models with these tools

    - services are also being generated as well as the UI – where are fields located and how do we navigate between them

    - we will be allowed access to these automation tools for our custom code and modifications
    - look at providing us preview releases to get familiar on how things work and provide feedback to SGHE

    - test early and often approach – huge increase in unit tests 100 to over 1000 = better quality
    - our people need to learn GRAILS, java, groovy skills as well as spring and hibernate, still using PL/SQL apis
    ** SGHE please provide us a VM spec for a sample sandbox application

    Resource Oriented Architecture – RESTful architecture allows us to extend our Open Digital Campus

    More sessions …IT Lounge on Tuesday at 4pm

    © 2007-2012 Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education - Leo de Sousa Creative Commons License
    Enterprise Architecture in Higher Education by Leo de Sousa is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
    Based on a work at leodesousa.ca.
    Suffusion theme by Sayontan Sinha

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