As the national economic climate worsens, and college and university endowments, coffers, and funding sources shrink, schools are forced to get the most out of every dollar. That means that administrators are bending over backwards to see that all new investments provide maximum return on investment (ROI) over the long term. Campus eCommerce is no…

A long time ago, revamping a school's telecommunications infrastructure was up there with scaling Mount Everest as one of the toughest challenges around. First up was the task of finding a new PBX. Then came the chore of rewiring the campus. Before long, project costs skyrocketed. Even well-funded IT departments struggled to get the job done.…

Increasingly, colleges and universities are turning to open source as a way to meet their technology infrastructure and application needs. Open source has changed life for visionary CIOs and their campus communities nationwide. The author discusses what these technologists see as the benefits--and the considerations.

MySpace and Facebook may have been pioneers in the world of social software, but nowadays, colleges and universities across the country are embracing better and more targeted forms of technology, to enable their campus users to interact. Today, the world of social software includes traditional venues and formats: (1) blogs; (2) wikis; and (3)…

When most academic technologists tackle computing, their time is occupied by laptops and servers--relatively small-scale stuff. A couple of blades here, a couple of blades there. Generally, even for network managers, the processing power rarely stacks up to anything awe-inspiring. Sometimes, however, computing can be bigger and broader than many…