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Campus Support

Handheld Inventory Tool

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Did you ever wonder who monitors all those items of capital equipment for the campus? Equipment Management must inventory all 37,907 items in the campus inventory, representing almost $300 million in campus assets, at least once every two years.

Technology is available to facilitate the inventory process in the form of portable, hand-held, laser-barcode scanners. The handheld scanner selected for use at UCI is manufactured by Symbol Technologies (www.symbol.com) and runs the Palm operating system. The scanner displays the equipment item’s property number, description, serial number, and location of record. It is also possible to perform edits on the spot.

NACS staff programmed the application that runs on the Palm O/S and developed a custom interface which synchronizes scanner records and AdCom databases. Adcom made some parallel changes in their systems to accommodate the new application.

After the inventory process is completed, the data is uploaded to the AdCom server. The database is updated and documents campus compliance with State and Federal accounting requirements. Use of the handheld scanner in limited settings has already shown its potential to greatly cut down the time and manpower needed to inventory capital equipment. Departments who would like to use the new system should contact Helen Chang, hmchang@uci.edu, x46111

Instructional Technology Seminar

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FITI, the Faculty Instructional Technology Institute (formerly known as the Faculty Summer Institute) was held on June 25th-28th, 2001. The Institute is offered by the Division of Undergraduate Education (DUE) with instructional and funding assistance from NACS.

13 faculty and instructional staff representing 9 campus departments were given presentations on the use of instructional technology in the classroom. Skills developed included how to create and enhance course Web pages and Powerpoint presentations, and how to incorporate images and other electronic media into instructional materials.

FITI featured 3 days of training June 25th, 26th and 28th. June 27th was a practice day which gave faculty time to work on specific projects with consultants on hand. The new format was well received by this year’s participants.

Faculty from all academic disciplines are invited to apply for next year’s program. The Institute is designed for faculty and TAs who have little or no direct experience in developing and using instructional technology in their courses. More information is available at IRC’s Web site,http://www.irc.uci.edu/fiti.html

Facilities Network

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NACS and Facilities Management are jointly creating a network for monitoring and controlling campus heating and cooling (HVAC) equipment. This is one of a number of campus projects where NACS has assisted a department in design, planning, procurement, and implementation of a special-purpose networking project.

Facilities Management HVAC systems now connect in numerous ways, limiting centralized monitoring and control, and lack the high-speed communications needed to allow real-time management. Facilities Management has long envisioned a more effective system, but has been unable to get satisfactory assistance from outside consultants.

With the new network, every system in every building can be monitored and controlled 24 hours a day. The system will also support metering, capacity planning, and crisis management.

The network will be based on a Cisco gigabit backbone similar to UCInet including 6 core nodes supporting 60 buildings at 10 or 100 megabit/s. The system will be scalable and flexible with spare capacity and performance. This system will be independent of UCInet (and thus the Internet) for reasons of security.

Planning began in the Fall. Most of the equipment has been received and work crews have been hired. Fiber optic cable will be installed over the rest of the year, and the HVAC equipment will be hooked up early in 2002.

Citrix Metaframe

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Citrix Metaframe is a commercial product for using remote computing resources from your desktop. Applications can be set up so that they appear to run on your computer, but the actual processing is done on a server somewhere else. All your local machine is doing is providing a display.

Citrix offers several advantages. First, Citrix allows for low speed processors to “run” high-end applications that require a fast new computer. You can get more use out of your older systems, as long as there is one powerful shared computer on your network.

Second, Citrix provides easy administration. Instead of upgrading software on many machines in an office, using Citrix makes it necessary to upgrade only the shared server running Metaframe.

Third, Citrix enables the use of cross-platform applications. Mac, Unix, and DOS machines can all use Windows applications through the use of the Citrix client. For example, everyone can use Internet Explorer for the PC by installing and configuring the Citrix client.

NACS uses Citrix to allow Macintoshes around the office to connect to the new telephone billing program (called Mysoft.net). Mysoft.net uses Microsoft’s ActiveX system which will not run on Macs. With Citrix, NACS’s Macintoshes have the ability to access the billing system.

For more information on Citrix Metaframe, please refer to the vendor’s web site: http://www.citrix.com/products/

New ECE Computing Lab

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Recently NACS helped the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) assemble a new computing lab for ECE majors.

The Computer Science and Engineering Instructional Laboratory comprises 32 “SunRay Appliance” Unix workstations and a four-processor server. The lab will also include a station running NACS’s PayPrint service for student printing. The creation of the new lab was driven by record enrollments in ECE and the Henry Samueli School of Engineering. The new facility will serve both as an instructional lab and a drop-in homework lab.

30 of the workstations are Sun Microsystems SunRay 100’s for student use. The other two are SunRay 1’s for use as teaching aids which can be connected to overhead projectors.

The SunRay appliances were selected for the lab because ECE found these systems allowed much lower per-seat administration costs than other options.

ECE and NACS wish to acknowledge a generous contribution from Sun Microsystems, which helped make the new lab possible.