The Web has become an essential tool for communicating with and providing services to all University constituents, from prospective students all the way to alumni.
The Enterprise Infrastructure Services group leads Internet and Web initiatives at Boston College, assisting the University in creating dynamic and effective Web applications and the infrastructure to support them.
Designed to establish and support a stable, vigorous architecture, the services provided by the Enterprise Infrastructure Services group include:
Collaboration Systems
The primary mission of Collaboration Systems is to provide the necessary tools to facilitate the sharing of thoughts and ideas between various individuals and/or groups both within the BC community and beyond. These tools include but are not limited to Email, network file sharing, personal and event calendars.
Email:
The Boston College email environment consists of three major components, Proofpoint spam and virus scanning, Sympa list services, and Communigate Pro email delivery and retrieval. We provide email accounts to approximately 26,000 faculty, staff and students. In addition, we provide lifetime BC email addresses for approximately 40,000 alumni.
Network File Sharing (MyFiles):
Boston College currently utilizes Xythos Digital Locker 4.2 for both browser and folder based file sharing. This tool allows users to safely share files with anyone on the internet.
Personal and Event Calendar:
Boston College utilizes two different tools for calendar services. Oracle Collaboration Suite provides the majority of our personal calendar services while Webevent is utilized to communicate information about Campus wide events.
Beyond the 24x7 support of these applications, we continue to research and investigate new technologies and trends for potential use within the BC community. Some of our upcoming new services will include a Citrix presentation server to host PC lab applications, as well as exploring upgrade to our email messaging environment including unified messaging.
Web Technology Group
The Web Technology Group has three main areas of focus: server support, web site support and web design and development.
Server Support:
The team focuses on supporting the bc.edu web site, which includes the web server and the content management application used by site owners to update their content. The Web Tech Group also supports a Helix streaming video server, a "personal" web server where BC Community members can create their own web sites, and a PHP/MYQL web server that hosts high profile dynamic web sites and applications.
Web Site Support:
Boston College's web site, www.bc.edu actually consists of 180 unique web sites which are maintained by more than 500 web content editors. If people have a problem with their bc.edu web site, they call us. This could be anything from a coding issue to access requests to a request for a secure page to problems with a particular browser rendering their site content. We also assist with information architecture, helping users organize their site while ensuring it's attractive and functional.
Web Design and Development:
The Web Tech Group designed and developed the front end for the new Agora Portal. This included a unique AJAX application that allows users to easily customize the content that appears on their portal page. In addition, the team works with ITS Application services to design interfaces for administrative applications developed within our Oracle Portal environment.
We're currently in the process of customizing the popular open source tool Drupal to meet the needs of students, faculty and staff. This new suite of tools, branded BC Share, will allow BC folks to easily create their own Blog, Web pages, Photo Album, Wiki, Resume, CV and discussion forum, without writing a line of code. The Web Tech team also develops custom web forms and mini applications for various bc.edu web sites using PHP/MYSQL.
If you're interested in creating one of these for your web site, please review our web forms process document.
Middleware Services
The majority of the Middleware Services group’s responsibilities are in support of application infrastructure layer components and services. These middleware services are a critical part of the underlying architecture and are used by most University systems and applications. We work closely with other ITS groups to build new systems and to ensure existing systems continue to run smoothly. Some of the tools and service we support in this area include:
Identity management technologies:
Identity Management encompasses all of the technologies that relate to a user’s identity, including the creation of user credentials, the provisioning of accounts, authentication, authorization and directory information.
Network-related technologies:
The Middleware group works closely with the Networking team to ensure the stability and performance of the network on campus. Network Activation is one of the key services we support in this area. Some of the other services include DHCP servers, the radius servers and the load balancers.
University portal environment:
Middleware is also responsible for managing the BC Portal environment. We have spent a great deal of time over the past few years working to transition University web-based services from Agora to the new portal. The Middleware group is continuing to develop this new framework that will greatly enhance our ability to build and integrate new services for the University.
We also support a number of key enterprise services, these include:
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McAfee’s ePO and VirusScan – personal computer virus protection
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Emergency notification system - text, email and voice messaging in the event of an emergency on campus
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Print management services
Contact Information
Brian Bernier
Director
brian.bernier@bc.edu
(617) 552-3079