This spring the Texas A&M Maritime Academy (TAMMA) launched a new tool to get cadet information in shipshape order. TAMMA at Texas A&M’s Galveston campus is one of only six maritime academies in the United States, producing officers for the Merchant Marines and seagoing military services. Some of the tools to manage this elite program [...]
They have been the 12th Man, but now they are leaving. Others are already stepping up to stand ready in their place. This month we celebrate our eight student employees who are graduating. We wish we could keep them all, but alas! In a few months, Texas A&M will celebrate the 100th anniversary of [...]
Technology Services - Student Affairs regularly updates DSA computers as well as IT infrastructure and services to maintain a secure and dependable environment. DSA Computers (Windows workstations, laptops & tablets) are updated and automatically restarted during standing maintenance windows, which are typically on the fourth weekend of every month on Saturdays and Sundays between [...]
Examples of account compromises are on the rise. Weak passwords are one culprit. Phishing (social engineering) scams are also rampant. Even programs such as key loggers which record the keystrokes you type and then relay the information to a third party who extracts out the resource and credentials are common. In this day and age, [...]
Recently, we helped one of our departments (who shall remain nameless) identify an external vendor to help them with a website design. We were in the middle of an active development cycle and didn't have time to do the project for them. And so we were acting in the capacity of a consultant, whose responsibility [...]
There's a great new service offered by TAMU Libraries. They have digitized the entire collection of Aggieland yearbooks and put them online, in searchable format with a nice browsing interface. Looking through the old yearbooks, reading their editorials and letters, one can get the sense of how our predecessors lived in Aggieland. Browsing the first [...]
Central IT recently launched a new IT site (http://it.tamu.edu/). This is a complete redesign of the old AVPIT suite of sites into a clean, slick, visually appealing, completely responsive website, designed with usability in mind. The communications team really outdid themselves with this one. I especially like the Services "A to Z" link which allows [...]
This is a very intriguing video about the consequences of smarter and more numerous robots. The end of the video, where the author outlines an argument for those industries which will be hit the hardest, is scary.
It seems like a pretty basic question. But we've learned through experience that classifying our work into different categories allows us to plan our time more efficiently and document what we do resulting in greater transparency. So, what is work? Work is defined as anything that expends human resources. In IT, we divide the work [...]
It seems that lots of Tier I Universities are paying millions of dollars to consultants to assess their IT offerings and make recommendations. One example is Cornell, who had their assessment done by Bain a number of years ago. After watching this video, I was surprised by the similarity not only of our current IT situation [...]