7:30am – 9:00am Registration and Coffee

9:00am – 9:15am Introduction

9:15am – 10:00am Feeding the Bandwidth Beast - Addressing demand and reducing cost through a collaborative network redesign project
Speakers:
Debbie Pepper, Senior Director, Operations and Collaborative Services, Colleges of the Fenway
Sean Philpott, CIO and Associate Vice President, Information Technology at Emmanuel College
Justin Ragsdale, Director of Network Operations , Wentworth Institute of Technology

6 colleges in Boston and their IT leadership grappled with the reality of how to meet the growing demand and requirements by students, faculty and staff for additional Bandwidth while maintaining reliability improving flexibility, redundancy and scalability. Additional focus was placed on reducing unit costs and leveraging resources for both the common and individual needs of the campuses.
This session will most benefit the following; Chief information officers, senior IT leaders, and campus executives/administrators, IT directors and managers

Every higher Ed IT organization has the competing demands of time, budget, resources and serving the needs of a bandwidth hungry population while being nimble to make changes quickly and efficiently. The difficult choices of determining essential in house services versus commodity services and how to effectively cooperate beyond your campus to gain an edge are strategies that can be shared. In this session you will learn how a project began from a common and identified need and grew to a significant undertaking that addressed the multi-facets of a network redesign. We will walk through the resources needed, vendors, project owners and areas to be aware of that should be avoided.

10:00am - 10:45am Building a Next Generation Wireless Network
Speaker: Doug Wilkinson, Associate Director, Network Technology Group, Brown University

Before the introduction of the iphone, wireless network access was considered a secondary network service. Today wireless is expected everywhere and always available. We'll describe the process we went through to transform our wireless network to meet the needs of the next generation of students and the devices they bring with them.

10:45am – 11:00am Break

11:00am – 11:45am Chaos Theory and the Evolution of an Enterprise Network (A brief case study of what NOT to do)
Speakers:
Barry Grant, Director of Information Technology, Manchester Community College
Douglas Michele, Network Manager, Manchester Community College

Private institutions and public higher education systems are examining ways to realize economies of scale, standardize systems and components, simplify the delivery of applications and deploy new technologies efficiently. An enterprise network may seem like a splendid idea and a perhaps even a necessity to reach these objectives. Planning for such an enterprise network requires precision, extensive research, accurate cost analysis, agility and speed of project management and a realistic understanding of the environment and of end user expectations. This presentation explores how, where and to what extent any deficiencies in planning can severely impact the development and deployment of and enterprise network.

11:45am – 12:45pm Lunch

12:45pm – 1:30pm Using Aruba RAP technology to extend campus wireless networks to building not connected to the LAN
Speakers:
James Taft, Assistant Director of Technology Support Services, Wesleyan University
KenTaillon, Network Administrator, Wesleyan University

Wesleyan maintains about 170 freestanding residential houses as student housing for seniors. Although these houses are functionally considered on campus housing, they are actually neighborhood houses owned by Wesleyan but not connected to our campus LAN. Providing network services to these houses has historically been a significant challenge for us as we have moved through residential Internet providers including Comcast and AT&T. We are now back with Comcast, but our recent implementation of Aruba on campus is helping us as we are leveraging their RAP technology to extend our campus wireless network to these houses with Comcast residential Internet as the network backbone. We are still in the testing stages of this project, but the results have been very promising.

1:30pm – 1:45pm Break

1:45pm – 2:30pm Innovation Drives Investment and Makes IT Look Pretty Darn Good
Speaker: Al Williams, Chief Information Officer, Massasoit Community College

Learn how Massasoit Community College is investigating using their wireless network data to automate manual functions like attendance. Innovative uses of the wireless network help to spur needed investment as well as show how IT is contributing to student success.

2:30pm – 3:00pm Wrap-up / Open Discussion

3:00pm End