Educause Floor Shopper: CT Exclusive: Our Product Picks

Click here to receive your FREE subscription to Campus Technology

Home > Educause Floor Shopper: CT Exclusive: Our Product Picks

Hardware Review

Educause Floor Shopper: CT Exclusive: Our Product Picks

9/30/2006

Enterprising Administrative Solutions

Business intelligence finally hits the classroom. Here at Campus Technology, we continually cover BI solutions for campus administrators and staffers who find data-mining and analytic technology essential to uncovering patterns and trends, providing analyses, and generating actionable reports that can change the face of campus business and operations. But the people at SAS will be demonstrating the as-yet-unplumbed depth of value in analytics for the classroom.We urge conference attendees to see the demo of the SAS Enterprise Guide for teaching and learning: “Point. Click. Teach.” Most interesting is the fact that so many universities have the Enterprise Guide as part of their SAS bundle, but may not even know it. With the Guide, students and teachers will now be able to analyze data, generate reports, and more—just as campus business staffers do. Booth 102.

More BI solutions to catch. Two new BI solutions from Campus Management have caught our eye as well: CampusQuery and CampusAnalytics. Conference attendees—especially those already CampusVue-invested— should stop by the Campus Management booth for a demo of both new products. CampusQuery, a BI dashboard, gives administrators real-time access to website, program, and CampusVue data, allowing users to proactively guide business performance on a daily basis and handle problems as they crop up. The CampusAnalytics web-based dashboard for campus execs provides visibility into just about every aspect of the student lifecycle. Administrators can more effectively measure, analyze, report, and make data-driven decisions about recruiting, admissions, financial aid, student retention, and more. Booth 203.

Human capital management for the rest of us. Human capital management (HCM) is one of the fastest-growing enterprise application segments, lauded as the way to maximize productivity and retention through integrated talent, performance, and learning systems. But if you think that HCM systems are only within reach of large enterprises, you need to visit the Saba booth. The company has just launched Saba OnDemand, a webbased service that organizations of all sizes can use to deploy fully managed HCM without the resource requirements of on-site implementations. It comes packed with all the features of its older siblings—the Saba Enterprise applications often installed on-site at larger institutions. Saba OnDemand now offers HR departments of all sizes an opportunity to work with a mature HCM system without placing new burdens on IT. Booth 1442.

Help is in the house. Spending too much time batch-processing housing system requests? Banner-using campuses will be happy to discover that an annoying disconnect has been solved by SunGard Higher Education: External housing systems of all kinds can now integrate with an institution’s Banner student administration/information system, eliminating the need for custom point-to-point (often batch-oriented) integration. The Sun- Gard HE Integration for Housing software now allows administrators to “grab” vital student information in real time and quickly and smoothly enable housing solution processes, and vice-versa. This means that the housing system can, for instance, easily access student ID or eligibility data and, likewise, the Banner system can access housing system data such as a student’s new address or housing-related fees. Booth 403.

Bouncers at the Gate

Messaging security just keeps getting better and better, which is a good thing: To date, it’s been a real battle for college and university technologists to keep no end of evils from compromising networks and data. But we’ve seen real advances in the messaging security space over the past 18 months, and attendees should not miss a stop at the Proofpoint booth to catch a glimpse of an impressively comprehensive solution. The just-released Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway 4.0 appliance and Proofpoint Protection Server 4.0 software are designed to provide rapid-response protection against all forms of message-borne threats: spam and viruses, intellectual property leakage, and breaches of student, staff, and faculty data. Proofpoint has enhanced the system’s content security features, has stepped up the message-processing features, and has added a slew of core platform enhancements. The company also offers a Zero-Hour Anti- Virus Module for protection against emerging virus attacks (during those first critical hours after a new virus is released, but before traditional anti-virus signatures have been updated), enhanced directory harvest attack prevention, and even Japanese/Chinese language spam defense (and who among us has not been barraged by communiqués from the Far East lately?). Booth 1638.

Sprint Nextel to the Rescue—Literally

On the heels of the Hurricane Katrina disaster, colleges and universities—especially large public institutions—are looking for solutions that will help them coordinate campuswide and even community- and region-wide, before, during, and in the wake of a disaster. At the Sprint Nextel booth, attendees will get a firsthand look at Sprint’s disaster preparedness technology, which features Emergency Response Team (ERT) and interoperability solutions designed for any department that needs to communicate both internally and across other departments and agencies, jurisdictions, and regions; respond to an emergency; and coordinate field-training exercises. Pivotal to the solutions are Nationwide Walkie-Talkie and Emergency Group Connect digital walkie-talkie services and wireless web capabilities; and around-the-clock ERT, which consists of Disaster Support for first responders, Field Training Support (training, field exercises, and access to equipment and services on a short- or long-term basis), Agency-Specific Event Support (including wireless equipment and service to support limited-duration events), and Mobile Cellular Sites and Portable Microwave Facilities (including rugged handsets along with a secure and stable communications platform for interoperability among private radio networks). Booth 635.