Kick-Starting IT

1997 was an interesting year. Bill Clinton was still president. Britney Spears was still hot. You could become a millionaire on IPO day just by starting a company that had ".com" in the name. At Columbia University, students had access to an exciting array of world class computing services, including 20MB of storage space, e-mail, and secure off-campus access.

Wait. What's changed in the last eight years? I can think of three things: space quotas have doubled to 40MB, Napster is now i2hub, Netscape Navigator is now Mozilla Firefox. The cutting edge of technology inevitably sliced ahead; Columbia did not follow, and it missed genuine opportunities to make computing services for its students more accessible, more secure, more... well, usable.

When Academic Information Systems and Administrative Information Services announced they were merging last year into Columbia University Information Technology, it hardly raised any eyebrows. AcIS was AcIS. If your computer breaks, you go to AcIS, and sometimes it gets fixed. And AIS? What's AIS? It's the Lerner Six of computing services: you may or may not know that it exists, but you sure as hell don't know what it does.

The truth is that for quite a while, AIS has been light-years ahead of AcIS in providing network and computing services to Columbia's officers, administrators, and other People More Important Than You. The good news is, with the merger, information technology can finally be kick-started out of the Dark Ages. Here's what should be done.

First, CUIT should deploy shared server space. Right now, when you use a lab workstation, you can save documents to the "My Documents" folder on the individual computer or you can save it to a floppy disk or USB key. If you put it in "My Documents," you can't get it from any other computer. If you have a floppy disk or a USB key, you risk losing or forgetting it. The only sure way to get a file from a lab computer to your personal computer is by going through the cumbersome process of e-mailing yourself.

With shared server space, you'd have a virtual hard drive that you can access at any lab computer or on your personal computer. If your computer crashes with a 20-page term paper, Dell tech support won't care, but if you saved it on your network drive, CUIT at least will have backed it up for you. The software needed to make this happen is called Samba. It's free, stable, widely used, and readily integrated into our servers. I first encountered it at Princeton University back in, gee, 1997.

Second, CUIT should make the mail services of AIS available to all students. Currently, there are two ways for students to check e-mail. POP3 allows the most flexibility, but you can't access old mail anywhere but your personal computer. IMAP and CubMail are simply too slow, buggy, and inefficient. Through AIS, however, Columbia administrators use industry-standard Microsoft Exchange servers. Aside from being much faster and displaying formatted e-mail properly, Exchange servers allow you to store contacts, find people, search old mail, and deploy spam filters much more effectively than the existing infrastructure.

Third, CUIT should integrate the NINJA printing system with photocopiers. It would make a lot of lives easier, and it also just makes sense. The machines themselves are billed by Flex accounts. Handling Flex transactions was the former responsibility of AIS; keeping printing quotas was the former responsibility of AcIS. Nobody likes being nickel-and-dimed for the most inane tasks, so why not let people pay for photocopies out of their printer quota? Ink is still ink, paper is still paper, and you get 100 pages a week just for being here. Why not make actually using it easier?

Lastly, CUIT must do more for wireless services on the campus, specifically in residence halls. It's ridiculous that I can't use the Internet on my laptop in my suite lounge. AcIS's policies strictly ban personal wireless devices, ostensibly on the grounds that they interfere with Columbia's campus wireless network. The fact that AcIS charges $1,500 for each wireless access point they install might also have something to do with it. But, microwave ovens and cell phones interfere with the campus wireless network more than a properly configured personal access point. This year, Barnard allowed personal wireless devices, so long as they were properly configured, secured, and approved. Their wireless network is still working.

Merging two departments with similar goals to cut bureaucracy is a wonderful move, but the cost and infrastructural benefits of such a move have to be visible to people other than budget-makers and high-level administrators. Certain services that CUIT doesn't offer but could aren't just good idea-they're common sense and have been in place at many other schools for years. There's nothing inherently wrong, functionally speaking, with the technology of 1997, except that, well, everyone else is living in 2005.