|
News Release BOISE STATE NEWS RELEASE/June 25, 2008 Boise State Receives Two Achievement Awards from State Technology Council Boise State University’s Office of Information Technology is the recipient of two Information Technology Achievement Awards from the Information Technology Resource Management Council (ITRMC). The university also received a commendation for collaborative work with the University of Idaho. Governor C.L. “Butch” Otter presented the awards at a ceremony this morning. The ITRMC was created by the Legislature to encourage advances in information technology and telecommunications that improve the efficiency and productivity of state and local government. Boise State’s winning projects are: TouchNet uPay Portal, in the category of Government to Citizens. Extending the capabilities originally designed for processing student tuition and fee payments, the TouchNet uPay Portal became the campus standard for online credit card transactions in February 2007. There are currently 35 uPay sites processing more than $42 million in transactions per year. These capabilities allow all university colleges, departments and business units to establish the general use of credit cards to support their unique online business transactions, while assuring that all transactions are centrally recorded, managed and secured. The number of sites continues to grow and consists of everything from processing requests for transcripts and payments for childcare, parking and library fees to registration and payment for state conferences and workshops. Google Applications for Education, in the category of Public/Private Partnerships. The university has partnered with Google Inc. to provide and manage student e-mails and provide a suite of collaborative tools, all at no cost to the university. These collaborative tools include e-mail (G-Mail), personal and enterprise calendaring (Google Calendar), text messaging and international voice calling (Google Talk), an ability to create, share and collaborate on documents, spreadsheets and presentations (Google Docs and Spreadsheets) and the ability to create and publish individual Web pages (Google Page Creator). The cost savings as a result of this partnership have permitted the reprioritizing and reassignment of university resources, provided students and self-selected faculty and staff with an immediate increase in capabilities, access and support, and have met the demand for more up-to-date services. The commendation for collaborative work is for a fiber optic interconnect and provision of services to the University of Idaho-Boise Center at the Idaho Water Center. Boise State University IT staff partnered with their counterparts at the University of Idaho to connect the UI-Boise Center located in the Idaho Water Center to the Boise State campus across the river to the south to share data, voice and Internet services. The intent was the provision of high-bandwidth telecommunications capabilities between the two schools in support of teaching and research, to reduce costs and to leverage limited resources by sharing skill sets and staff commitments. With support and encouragement from executive management at both schools, a collaborative telecommunications engineering team designed and engineered the first venture of its kind between the two universities. A memorandum of understanding has been signed, fiber optic cable has been installed and the UI-Boise Center now has direct network access to Boise State and access to the Internet — all at the same level of service and rates afforded to any department or college on the Boise State campus. Voice services will be provided to the UI-Boise Center early this fall. -30- Media Contact: Kathleen Craven, University Communications, (208) 426-3275, kcraven@boisestate.edu The Boise State University admission deadline for the fall semester is June 30. Admission materials must be submitted if degree-seeking students plan to take more than seven credits or apply for federal financial aid. More information is available at http://admissions.boisestate.edu.
Last reviewed on Wednesday, June 25, 2008
|
|
|