Fresh technologies converge at Concordia

Concordia University is a hotbed of learning and research, but it's also a focal point for new communication-technology concepts. The Montreal school has embraced voice and data convergence, Software as a Service (SaaS) and Service Oriented Architectures (SOA)."We're moving into a very fast phase of integration of computers, telephony, television podcasts," says Andrew McAusland, associate vice-president, Instructional and Information Technology Services at the university. "We're trying to ride the crest of that."Concordia runs an IP telephony network that supports softphones for student as well as staff and faculty. It operates two Wi-Fi networks branching from its campuses. It sends instant and text messages to students' IM clients and mobile phones to alert them of classroom changes, grades and other details. And the institution is rolling out software services under a clever name that McAusland takes credit for."This year we're introducing a package called WISE - Web Integrated Services for Education. We're pushing out wireless access, Microsoft Office over the Web, storage on the Web, translation software for 75 different languages, and TurnItIn.com for students."Host is the mostApplication and system hosting is the way to go for all sorts of organizations, private or public sector, McAusland figures."If you push a work desktop over the Web, a person could work from anywhere. You could grow your staff by 30%, 40% and share the workspace," he says, advocating hoteling and teleworking. "You only have to maintain software from one spot....You could go to a thin client at $400 or replace a computer for $2,000. You get the same functionality....The lifetime of a thin client is quite a bit longer than a computer.""The only pitfall is uptime," he warns. "When you push a service like this, you'd better be sure you're running a reliable environment....It's the data network, and back-end processing too. The servers supporting the software need 24-7 care."The formula for success at Concordia is straightforward. "I have it maintained 24-7, that's it," McAusland says. "A lot of these things are saving me labour on other fronts. It's just a matter of arranging your work resources to meet the need."Young at the network coreYouth informs Concordia's IT mindset. "We have 40,000 students, and they're all young - first-year students this year were born in 1987, '88," McAusland says. "They have an expectation level in the way they communicate, and the way they use technology."Lately Concordia was searching for a way to introduce voice capabilities on its website to facilitate the student-application process. "I wanted to put a click-to-talk button in there, so new students could use their computer to talk to somebody live at the university and help them complete the application form," McAusland says.The school installed BlueNote Networks Inc.'s SessionSuite SOA edition. A superset of BlueNote's Session Suite Enterprise Edition, the SOA version includes a software development kit that lets companies build voice processes into applications.Service Oriented Architectures allow applications to share functions, so software developers don't always have to recreate every line of code. BlueNote's SOA voice function could be built into all sorts of applications, such as financial and registration systems. (For more on SOA, read "'SOA' comes calling on telephone industry.") According to a BlueNote spokesperson, the SOA iteration is more popular than the enterprise flavour, thanks to this flexibility.Future plansNext, Concordia is considering extending the wireless networks at the two campuses even further so they meet in the middle and cover off-campus students. "That will encompass about 16,000 of our students," McAusland says. "We could literally become an ISP for them."Asked if Concordia is investigating the faster WiMAX protocol to enhance the wireless networks even more, McAusland simply says, "We're always looking at things." That's no surprise from an organization so well versed in the latest high-tech ideas.

Fresh technologies converge at Concordia

News | 08/09/2007 1:01 pm EDT

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