The Office of the Chief Information Officer (CIO) is responsible for providing information technology (IT) services to the entire campus community. These services provide access to computing resources that students, faculty members, administrators, and staff members need as they learn and apply the products of learning, and contribute to the university’s community of scholarship. The University is in the process of reorganizing these services and resources campus wide under a new division that provides planning and technical guidance in the integration of varied new and existing campus information technologies. Located in the University Outreach Center and Forsyth Building, the division is headed by the Chief Information Officer (CIO).
The central computing facility uses Compaq Alpha systems to handle core business processing and email. Core business processing on the Alphas includes student records, financial, and alumni systems from Systems and Computer Technology Corporation, and several applications developed by division staff. Email from off campus gets delivered through one of the Alpha systems. All students receive a WCU email account that allows them to communicate with their peers, faculty members, and university offices. The Campus Pipeline portal is the primary tool used by students to access email and other campus and course related news.
There are over 3,000 microcomputers in offices, classrooms, and lab facilities on campus, most connected to the campus network. Student residence halls are on the campus network and have two network ports per room. There are three general student microcomputer lab facilities which are open at least eighty hours per week. The lab located in Hunter Library is open 24 hours from Sunday afternoon through Friday night during fall and spring semesters. The IT division supports both Windows and Macintosh operating systems and various microcomputer application programs. Faculty, students, and staff may call IT Services at 227-7ITS (227-7487) if they need help with any IT services or resources.
Software programming languages on the central system include BASIC, C, FORTRAN, Pascal, COBOL, and MACRO, with Datatrieve and Focus as common report-retrieval languages. Other software that is centrally licensed, but with a limited number of licenses available, include SPSS for Windows and Minitab for Windows. These statistical analysis programs are accessed over the campus network in student labs and computer classrooms. The University of North Carolina has a grant from SAS Institute that makes a wide range of SAS software available for faculty and student use, including at home use. For large research problems and special applications, faculty and students may access the computer resources of the North Carolina Supercomputing Center located in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.
The campus network connects to the North Carolina Research and Education Network (NC-REN), which provides WCU with access to two-way videoconferences as well as an OC-3 (155-megabit) data path to the Internet. The WCU World Wide Web server at http://www.wcu.edu has general information about Western. The IT Services web site at http://its.wcu.edu provides a variety of useful IT related information. The university is also an active member of EDUCAUSE.
This page is maintained by Nancy Carden in the
Office of Academic Affairs.
Last updated: 3/4/2003.
Copyright 2003 by Western Carolina University .