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CIT Advanced Technology & Architectures | |||||
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Advanced Technology and Architectures serves as a breeding ground for new ideas as they become mainstream, providing an opportunity for training and development to as many people as possible. ATA incorporates staff on a "sabbatical leave" from other divisions of CIT, who work with the core ATA staff and other sabbatical staff to develop products or services and then return to their home divisions, taking the projects with them. ATA's Mission
IT Architecture Forum A monthly series of seminars on IT Architecture topics at Cornell, the first Tuesday afternoon of every month. > 2007 IT Architecture Forum sessions > 2006 IT Architecture Forum sessions iPhone Software Development
Tuesday, 5 August, 3pm G01 Biotechnology Building CIT's Information Systems division is in the midst of a project to upgrade the central Content Management System (CMS) hosting service to version 5 of CommonSpot. Over the course of the next few months, existing CommonSpot sites will be migrated from the CommonSpot 4.6 servers to the new v5 environment. Nathan Reimer from IS joins us this month for a "CommonSpot 101" overview, to talk about what CommonSpot is, how it works, and why you might need it, as well as to go over some of the new features and capabilities of CommonSpot v5 that current and future site owners need to know about. Apple & iPhone WWDC Update Tuesday, 1 July, 3pm G01 Biotechnology Building If you saw any news coverage from Apple's mid-June Worldwide Developer Conference, you probably at least know that a new iPhone model and OS are coming, but much more happened. CIT staffers Joanne Button, Michelle Mogil, and Mark Anbinder were all at WWDC, and will provide some updates on upcoming Apple technologies as they apply to the Cornell IT community. We'll talk about core software technologies in Apple's next major Mac OS X release, dubbed "Snow Leopard." These include Sun's ZFS filesystem, OpenCL for harnessing GPU computing power, and the Safari 4 browser with support for HTML 5. The new operating system will also include Exchange 2007 Server support and other "push" communication technologies such as Apple's new MobileMe replacement for .Mac on the desktop. Of course, we'll also talk about the upcoming iPhone 3G handset and iPhone 2.0 software (also available for iPod touch) and how they'll fit into Cornell's current and future messaging and personal productivity environments. > Video in MPEG-4 > PowerPoint presentation Gartner Portal Tuesday, 3 June, 3pm G01 Biotechnology Building Since we talked about the Gartner, Inc. resources available to campus in an IT Architecture Forum last year, we've finalized the new web portal that allows members of the Cornell community to take full advantage of the Gartner web site for extensive research and analysis. That's among the many resources available through Cornell's comprehensive subscription to Gartner's information tools, including one-on-one consultations with Gartner experts. Come for an update from ATA staff on how to use these tools, including a quick look at how a CIT-run web page passes authenticated users along to Gartner's web site. > Video in MPEG-4 > PowerPoint presentation "I'm a Mac." "I'm a PC." Tuesday, 6 May, 3pm G01 Biotechnology Building Whether you believe it's because the MacBook Air is sexy, the Mac OS user experience is better, or Apple's simply benefiting from an iPod-heavy culture, there's no avoiding the fact that Macs are making tremendous inroads in business and in academia. What do we as technologists need to know about making Macs fit into a Windows-centric environment? Apple's made great progress with networking inter-compatibility in recent OS versions, but some planning and thought are still required. By request, this month we'll have a round-table discussion with some success stories, gotchas, and questions. If you have experiences and/or inquiries on the subject, please join us. > Video in MPEG-4 > Audio in MP3 > Active Directory scripts at Shukwit.com April Fools! Tuesday, 1 April, 3pm G01 Biotechnology Building In observance of April Fools Day, when technologists join everyone else in sharing pranks and bogus news, TidBITS Editor and Cornell alum Adam C. Engst joins us to talk about the reason we're so easily fooled, year after year; the best IT pranks are the ones that play on technologies we'd really like to see. Adam will lead a discussion on successful TidBITS April Fools topics of the past, some standouts from other sources, and some of the possible technologies we'd really like to see turn from the prank of yesterday to the product of tomorrow. > Video in MPEG-4 CIT Exchange Server Tuesday, 4 March, 3pm G10 Biotech Recently CIT's Systems and Operations (S&O) division implemented a pilot deployment of Exchange 2007 which is now in active use by the Office of the President, other senior Day Hall administrators, and Alumni Affairs and Development. S&O's Joanne Button will describe the architecture of that Exchange 2007 System. In addition, she will describe the mechanisms included in the implementation to support Blackberry handheld devices. > Video in MPEG-4 > Audio in MP3 > PowerPoint presentation CUWebAuth 2.0 Tuesday, 5 February, 3pm G01 Biotech CIT's Identity Management team has completely overhauled its web single-sign-on application, CUWebAuth, and will be rolling out the new version in mid March. The new CUWebAuth 2.0 is part of a larger project to migrate all Kerberos authentication services to Kerberos version 5. Pete Bosanko from Identity Management will be joining us for this month's IT Architecture Forum to discuss the new features and enhanced security of CUWebAuth 2.0. He'll outline what the changes will mean for folks needing to upgrade existing web applications, as well as show a high-level release schedule. You'll have an opportunity to sign up for beta testing, too. Fedora Commons Tuesday, 8 January, 3pm G10 Biotech Sandy Payette, executive director of Fedora Commons, will join us to talk about this new non-profit organization that's been established to continue work on the robust, open-source Fedora technology platform, a suite of digital content repository tools and resources that began as research in Cornell's Computer Science department in the late 1990s and continued as a collaboration between Cornell and the University of Virginia, funded by the Mellon Foundation. The Fedora platform is changing the way scientists, scholars, and educators produce and share the intellectual outputs of their work, while ensuring the durability and longevity of the resulting record of knowledge. Sandy will review the basic Fedora architecture, followed by a discussion of new partnerships that will help developers address such technical challenges as e-research and collaborative digital libraries. Note that we're in a different room than usual, the larger hall across the atrium from the Racker Seminar Room, in the northwest corner of the Biotech Building's ground floor |
Ongoing Projects iPhone Mania Apple's iPhone, released in June 2007, has certainly sparked a lot of attention and activity! It's undeniably a revolutionary device. We've compiled some notes and potentially helpful links for those investigating, or using, iPhones. > iPhone Notes & Links SourceForge Enterprise Edition In order to aid adaptation to the rapidly changing technological landscape, to harness efficiencies in collaboration within administrative IT as well as across campus, and to help build relationships with other institutions and organizations, ATA is introducing SourceForge Enterprise Edition. SourceForge Enterprise Edition is a collaboration platform that combines many aspects of project management and development in a centralized, manageable, and searchable system. These aspects include: source code management, issue tracking, forums and mailing lists, document management, wikis, file release management, etc. > SourceForge Project IT Architecture Web Site ATA is working in conjunction with CIT's IWS group and Elucid8 Design, LLC to develop a comprehensive IT Architecture system for use at Cornell. The system will be an interactive web site, using the CommonSpot content management tool implemented at Cornell to allow for distributed assembly and maintenance of the information. The goal is to offer current information about what technologies are in use throughout campus. > elucid8 Design draft IT Architecture web site OneStart Workflow OneStart Workflow is the workflow engine behind Indiana University's Kuali system. ATA staff have been investigating and participating in expanding its utility as a general enterprise workflow engine, in concert with OneStart Workflow developers. A sufficiently generalized enterprise workflow system holds the promise of automating many inefficient and error-prone manual processes around the university. > OneStart Workflow Project Notifications Channel Partly in support of the Workflow project, we're exploring user requirements and developing an architecture for a "Notifications Channel" for uPortal.Cornell. This channel would handle notification of work items needing attention, emergency alerts, optional event notifications such as upcoming concerts or seminars, and whatever other types of notification we might identify. The emphasis for the architecture is ease of use and user configurability. Two-Factor Authentication Evaluation, PKI Investigation Ron DiNapoli spent time during FY06 looking at what it would be like to deploy a two-factor PKI system here at Cornell. A separate project for examining two-factor authentication (not necessarily PKI-based) was also drafted but did not receive as much attention due to organizational priorities. The two respective project pages are still available for viewing, but no active work is taking place on these projects now. > Two Factor Authentication Evaluation Project Page > ATA PKI Investigation Project Page Thoughts, Papers & Notes Mark Anbinder talks about his experiences using Parallels Desktop, the new virtualization software that allows Intel-based Mac users to run Windows or other Intel-based operating systems on their Macs. > Mark's Parallels Desktop Notes Aaron Hamid and Aaron Godert of the Advanced Technologies and Architecture division in CIT recently attended a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) workshop at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Cambridge, MA. > Aaron Godert's worshop notes | ||||
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