For those that were worried that they did not hear the loud speaker test last Wed., rest at ease, your ears are in fine shape.

 

As mentioned in an earlier Update, Business Operations, Campus Safety and ITS have been working together to identify an outdoor siren warning that can be used for severe weather notification and/or in case of an emergency.  We invited a vendor out last Wed. to demonstrate their outdoor and indoor loud speakers.  The vendor showed up, the speakers did not; hence a loudspeaker test could not be conducted. 

 

Outdoor and indoor speaker systems are in their infancy as far as development is concerned.  We have found that many Colleges have rushed to purchase outdoor and indoor warning systems without testing and then have had to make severe adjustments to get them to work at an adequate level. Of course, that translates to significant additional cost.   NCC is taking a more cautious approach, we want to see these systems work before we purchase.  In addition, NCC has a unique challenge because we have a long narrow campus and must contain the sound close to our campus borders.

 

 

I have mentioned the many challenges of installing the new One-Card System called CBORD Gold.  ITS has been working on setting up servers and laying out building locations and codes for the past few weeks.  This week ITS is working with the project manager from CBORD to install, test and migrate to the new system.  There may be times when your ID card will not open doors to buildings as we are in the process of replacing all alarm panels and re-wiring the connections and then programming them into the new CBORD system.  The outages should be for short periods of time.  Our goal for this part of the project is to complete Meiley-Swallow first as there are fewer people that use it at this time of the year.  We will then concentrate on getting the Townhomes, Ward, Patterson, Kiekhofer, and the Science Center complete.  Finally, we will complete Carnegie so that it will be available 24/7.  The new Fine Arts Center will also be on this new system once it is open.

 

In addition to the alarm system we are migrating to a new Photo-ID system.  The challenge here is to migrate all photographs from the old ID system to the new ID system and then add all the privileges associated with that so that we don't have to produce new ID cards for current card holders.  Those privileges include use of the Library via a bar code and use of food services via a prox code.  This system must also interface with Datatel.

 

The installation does not stop with the above because we are also migrating Chartwells from their current BlackBoard system to the CBORD Gold system.  All the cash registers used by Chartwells will be removed and replaced with new ones.  Those then will be programmed to work with CBORD and also interface with Datatel so that meal plans can be entered into the CBORD system.

 

Finally, we will be adding Follets Bookstore to the CBORD system.  Later we will be adding Access and the Alarms Management Module and NetCard Manager.  This is an enormous project and will take many more months to complete.  However, it our hope that by the end of the week all services and functions for current ID card holders use will be up and running on the new system.

 

 

ITS has reworked the Cable TV distribution system to eliminate a distribution center.  The more distribution centers, the higher the chance that light signals will be lost which in turn, can degrade the quality of the cable TV picture.  We are in the process of making sure those changes worked as intended.