Technology of the Month

Looking around University Relations and Admissions or on the desks of student workers in Student Activities and Residential Life, one sees the desktop replaced with a small, lightweight thin client. Computing veterans recall the days of “dumb” terminals and ponder the idea that technology has come full circle.  However, many users are confused by this [...]

In light of the recent tragedy at Wesleyan, we feel that this is a very appropriate topic to talk about. About three years ago, we contracted with a service called Connect ED for our Campus Emergency notification. Blackboard now own this service and it is being referred to also as “Blackboard Connect”. We activated this [...]

Wireless networking has been become increasingly prevalent in public places and our own homes over the past few years, and many of us have begun to rely on its availability. At Wesleyan, wireless coverage is available in more than 90% of the campus, and we continue to improve coverage.
We are often asked – “Why [...]

In the nearly two years that have passed since Wesleyan ITS launched its Web 2.0 initiative, the expression “Web 2.0″ has lost some of its former currency, but the infrequency of the phrase does not mean that the attendant technologies have fallen out of favor. On the contrary, “2.0″ tools, including blogs and wikis, have [...]

If you maintain a website, you may have wondered at times why you are unable to find them through searches or that they are way below in the result set. The reasons for this are very complex. Different search engines employ different algorithms for finding the websites that best match the search term. Many of [...]

Thin clients are computers that rely on servers on the network to run all applications and store your data while providing you essentially the same user experience as the desktop or laptop that you currently use. They are analogous to the terminals that one used to run applications on a mainframe computer prior to the [...]

Most of us by now have received at least one email message where the original attachment is missing and the subject line preceded with {Filename} tag. It is usually accompanied by an attachment called Wesleyan-Attachment-Warning.txt that shows the name of the file that was removed. Some of the most common attachments that are removed are [...]

Wesleyan Events Calendar is the central repository for events that are held at Wesleyan. As you know, the campus is alive with many exciting events every day. We describe here how you can choose to receive a custom email listing of the events in the calendar.
These events are submitted to the system by clicking on [...]

Phishing refers to the technique used by criminal elements to “fish” for personal information by pretending to send official E-mails.
Wikipedia describes it as “In computing, phishing is an attempt to criminally and fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication.”

Over the past several years, we have seen tremendous growth in the need for centralized document storage, fueled by the increased use of the web for information dissemination as well as increase in the use of rich media (high quality images, music and digitized videos) in teaching and research. As we progressed, we accommodated these [...]