The idea of publishing a Web site can make even the most battle-tested Internet veterans shake in their boots. But Ball State has made it as easy as possible for all students, faculty and staff to do just that.
"So you come to Ball State," assistant director of security, policy, systems and assessment Loren Malm said, "you're a Ball State student. You're eligible for Web publishing space, and it is available the minute you walk in the door."
Through the university's new service, located at iweb.bsu.edu, anyone with a valid Ball State username and password can create a Web site with 100 MB of storage in seconds.
"And you can do anything you want with that, inside the policies of the university," Malm said. "You can publish with any tool you want." Malm said iWeb is an awesome resource, as more and more classes are requiring students to create online portfolios.
"We want to give Web publishing to all students on campus," Malm said. "All students, all faculty, staff, everyone should have the ability to publish a Web site. We want to make it really easy."
Once created, a user's Web address, or URL, is http://username.iweb.bsu.edu.
In the past, users have had the ability to publish Web sites through the Frontpage server, which game users a sub folder on the Ball State site. The Frontpage server allowed students 25 MB of space. Another addition in the iWeb environment is the support console, where users can check their space usage and configure server extension settings.
"It used to be you had a folder in the old environment, you had something called a sub web, and it was OK, but it was a folder and there's only so many of those you can [store] on a server before it starts to slow down," Malm said. "In the new environment you don't have just a folder, you have an entire Web site, an actual domain ... and although it's not a completely separate server per person, it is a completely separate site per person, which is essentially the same thing."
Malm said the new system, which has been available for about a year, is a result of a $10,000 donation from the Microsoft Corporation in cooperation with the development of environments for large organizations such as universities.
"When you're in a university environment, you have thousands of people that are coming every year and leaving every year, guaranteed," Malm said. "What happens at a lot of universities is that because it's so difficult to manage for thousands and thousands of people at a time, it gets done at a more departmental or unit level."
Ball State's system is university-wide, meaning that all individuals and organizations utilize the same environment, Malm said. He also said Microsoft is using Ball State as a case study for this kind of technology, and that it may be emulated elsewhere in the future.
Malm said anyone still using the Frontpage server can create a new iWeb account any time, and that their old accounts will still be active. Frontpage accounts will be available through 2006, Malm said.
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