Faculty and students will be the masters of their own web domains upon the beginning of classes -- and their domains are growing.
In response to an increasing number of requests from students and faculty members for increased web publishing space, Ball State University Computing Services has increased the storage allocation of iWeb, the hosting platform for individual web services at Ball State University.
That increase -- a whopping 2 gigabytes of storage space from the original 100 megabytes -- provides space for 20 times the content the previous iWeb space allocation could offer.
Loren Malm, the assistant director of security, policy, systems and assessment for UCS, said that this increase will benefit students with any major, as well as faculty teaching in all disciplines.
"We know certain academic disciplines were unable to make effective use of iWeb because of the space limitation," Malm said. "We now anticipate that these areas will be able to fully leverage the benefits of the iWeb environment."
Malm said that the number of requests for increased publishing space, particularly in the last school year, is one of the main factors behind upgrading the iWeb system. Upon discussion of the problem, UCS Enterprise Systems Engineers proposed the increase, which made its way to the top of the chain of command -- the Associate Vice President For Information Technology Philip Repp and the Vice President for Information Technology O'Neal Smitherman -- in time to be implemented by the beginning of the school year.
"Through interviews with many students who have exceeded their storage quota, we have discovered many academic programs are moving toward using more digital video, digital audio and other media-rich content for assignments and digital portfolios," Malm said. "We knew that the previous allocation was simply insufficient to support these initiatives. For example, a single five-minute video clip might require ten megabytes of storage -- or more, if recorded at higher quality and size."
To compliment the vastly increased amount of space, UCS is implementing a few new services that will take iWeb from good to great.
ePrint, a sort of digital file system, will assist in writing papers and working on other projects by storing all available research materials in one area. iLocker is a digital media storage service that allows any student or faculty member to save large documents for later use, but it is not meant to be used for publishing content.
"The space can be accessed in a variety of ways, appearing as if it were another local hard disk drive attached to your computer for example," Malm said. "Accessing the storage will be easy, and will automatically appear when a student logs into a Windows computer within a UCS Lab or Bracken Library. The space will also be easily accessible through a Macintosh computer or through any computer, even if located off-campus."
With all of these improvements, UCS still is not spending as much money as it could be. Components such as data protection and backup and restore capabilities were funded through multiple sources, while disk and related components were funded through technology fees and the servers themselves are making their second run -- UCS had the technology and made them better.
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