Zimbra Acquired By Yahoo!
September 18, 2007 | Leave a Comment
Yesterday it was announced that Zimbra was acquired by Yahoo!. The initial shock of this for me is related to the fact that Plymouth State University just recently released Zimbra to our campus constituents. This changes this tool from a diamond in the rough that we recognized to something clearly recognized by a big player in the industry as a quality tool.
My only fear would be the direction the platform goes in. Many were unhappy about the Yahoo purchase of Flickr. Also, companies’ innovation can sometimes get slowed up while they are merging with a bigger organization. Regardless of those concerns, I’m excited about this change and look for good things to come from this partnership.
This excitement seems to be shared by our sales representative who sent us this:
We’re really excited because of the resources and commitment Yahoo brings to help Zimbra continue focusing on our key markets, including the Education sector. One of Yahoo’s key objectives in acquiring Zimbra is supporting and growing our presence in EDU, including on-premises deployments at colleges. Yahoo is a major proponent of open technologies and this will allow us to further grow the integration options and features of Zimbra, along with our partners in the EDU sector.
Tags: edu, education, email, merger, yahoo, zimbra
Leveraging CAS with Luminis
March 28, 2006 | 4 Comments
In SunGard Higher Education's Luminis product one of the many add-on packages you can install is CAS support. CAS is an acronym for Central Authentication Service. This WebISO solution is one of the most common in higher education. CAS was created originally by Yale, but ongoing support has been taken over by JA-SIG. When the CAS package is installed in Luminis, it makes Luminis act as a CAS authentication provider. Coupled with this built-in Luminis support, we use a CAS library called phpCAS that adds to the simplicity of deploying this within our environment.
Time and again, CAS has been proven an effective and simple way for us to quickly drop authentication ability into our homegrown PHP applications. Once a function was developed, this was easily reused across dozens of applications within a few short months. The ease of deployment made it easy to convince various developers to switch from custom authentication schemes.
In a PHP application on any of the servers in your environment you can do something like the following:
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<?php
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function casify()
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{
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// import phpCAS lib (http://esup-phpcas.sourceforge.net/)
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include_once($GLOBALS['INCLUDES'].'/cas/CAS.php');
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// initialize phpCAS
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phpCAS::client(CAS_VERSION_2_0,'luminis.institution.edu',443,'cas/');
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// check CAS authentication
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phpCAS::forceAuthentication();
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// at this step, the user has been authenticated by the CAS server
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// and the user's login name can be read with phpCAS::getUser().
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return phpCAS::getUser();
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}
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$username = casify();
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// nothing past the execution of casify() would occur without acquiring a valid CAS ticket
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?>
Note: the preceding code is an example. There is more sophisticated functionality that can be accomplished using CAS, this is merely a starting point for people interested in this WebISO technology.
Tags: cas, development, education, higher education, identity management, jasig, luminis, php, phpcas, security, sungard, sungard higher education, web development, yale, yalecas
Text Messaged Acceptance
February 8, 2006 | 1 Comment
Creighton University has started sending early acceptance to students who opted in for SMS notification. In laymans terms, they text message their cell phones.
Since November, 700 students - or 44 percent - of those admitted to Creighton have been notified through a text message. The school added the option on application forms last fall. [...]
Opting for the text message allows students to know the university's decision up to a week earlier. [...] text messages are sent to students within 24 hours of the admission committee's decisions, whereas letters can take several days to draft and then arrive in the mail. [...]
Katie Infantine, 17, of San Diego, [...] "Text messaging is really popular with my friends," Infantine said. "So the fact a college would do that is really cool."
Some may see this as a gimmick, but I think this is a fantastic way of generating buzz in high schools nationwide in the hallways, in a very personal way. Nothing like speaking to students with technologies they are familiar with.
Tags: acceptance, admission, admissions, creighton, creighton university, education, higher education, san diego, university
FaceBook - A Social Requirement in Higher Education
February 1, 2006 | 35 Comments
Facebook is a social site targeted at people associated with colleges and universities. Its popularity has gone through the roof this academic year, a quick peak at Alexa and you'll see how drastically its rank spikes.
During the winter semester Jenny was taking a class. A fellow student contacted her and informed her that she was the only one in the 15+ student class who did not have an account on Facebook. In fact, he was a bit annoyed at her for this and felt she really needed to create an account.
The level of involvement students feel with Facebook is astounding. This social software has become the preferred collaborative environment for them. By choice. Not by some academic decree or because people thought students needed to use it. They chose this product for themselves.
Wondering if this one example was an oddity and not truly indicative of an overall trend at Plymouth State or higher education in general? Casey got the following from Facebook: "There are 3,975 registered users at Plymouth State University. Like the other schools on the site, over 60% of them log in every 24 hours."
That means approximately 2,385 users are logging in to Facebook each day. Our campus portal gets around 3,800 uniques daily and we make it difficult for students not to use that...
Tags: education, face book, facebook, higher ed, higher education, plymouth state, plymouth state university, social, social software, university, web 2.0
Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act
October 26, 2005 | 1 Comment
The Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act is an Act targeted at financial institutions, which also applies to higher education institutions. In turn, they must be aware of and in compliance with the Act. Of specific concern is the Safeguards Rule [PDF].
In summary:
Under the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, the Safeguards Rule, enforced by the Federal Trade Commission, requires financial institutions to have a security plan to protect the confidentiality and integrity of personal consumer information.
Luckily the FTC has published: Financial Institutions and Customer Data: Complying with the Safeguards Rule, which as the name implies gives a nice summary of how to comply. Of particuar interest to me is the "Information Systems" section.
As a quick side-note about GLBA, it turns out that maybe the single key reason this Act received bypartisan support and in turn passed is because of Victoria's Secret.
Tags: act, education, federal trade commission, financial institutions, ftc, glba, gramm-leach-bliley, gramm-leach-bliley act, higher education, privacy, victoria's secret