The University of Alberta is transitioning its centrally supported learning management system (LMS) from the WebCT-based Blackboard Vista 8 to Moodle 2.0. Challenges and opportunities are plentiful in a project such as this: twelve years of WebCT has resulted in over 6000 course sections of material, every student and most faculty and instructors will be affected, several small Moodle 1.9 environments need to be rolled up, and associated projects have been suggested as this project gathers momentum. A discussion of our selection of Moodle, our pilot, our communications with constituents and the development of our project plan will be offered. A transformation of teaching and learning is one of our goals of this project, and we're discussing how to foster that transformation as our project proceeds over the next two years.

Drupal has achieved considerable acceptance as a Web publishing solution by a number of Canadian Universities. This panel will present the Drupal experience of the Universities of Waterloo, Brock, McGill and Windsor. Weaving around the common technical issues and the typical “roll-out” challenges, each institution nevertheless has unique experiences and lessons to share. Topics covered include; how did you do this in Drupal, and how did you roll out Drupal at your university. Training and support for the University community, the implementation plan and a variety of other issues will be discussed. A question period will follow the presentations from each panel member. This panel will be of interest to any institution who is using Drupal or considering a change in their Web publishing environment.

Panel members will include:

• Eva Grabinski (Waterloo)
• Kris Olafson (Waterloo)
• Meron James Hrycusko (Brock)
• Vlad Pavlovic (Windsor)
• Richard Dumala (Windsor)
• Karl Jarosweicz (McGill)
• Andrew Lindsay (McGill)

Supporting a microcell Wi-Fi network in parallel to your wired network is a high touch, high effort activity. Adding an access point to your network shouldn't require a site survey. This is about to change - you can stop building your Wi-Fi network piecemeal. Wi-Fi has grown up for the Enterprise.
Management tools for spectrum analysis and operational troubleshooting have matured as well. Now that you are providing critical services over your Wi-Fi network, you and your staff will want the support of enterprise-class tools.

Presenters:

• Guylain Briand, Director of Systems Engineers for Canada at Meru Networks
• Pete Wood, Account Manager for Integra Data Systems.

A tour through the many strategies we have employed to avoid dreaded complexity and massive costs associated with server clusters and SANS while still providing highly available services. All of this also builds upon our virtualization strategy further reducing costs and our carbon footprint. Discussion into how we have made services such as File, Email, Web, SQL, Citrix, and more highly available. The discussion will delve into how cutting edge technologies like Solid State Disks (SSD's) can allow you to achieve many of these goals while avoiding the expense and complexity of a SAN. These strategies have allowed us to offer a large array of services with a very small budget and even smaller staff compliment. Like all strategies there are downsides and an honest discussion into these downsides will occur so the audience leaves with the full tale, not a fairy tale.

Workstation deployment is an issue that every institution must deal with, but these tools often expect a homogeneous environment.As part of the Commodity IT effort at Simon Fraser University, the Unified, Federated Deployment Services project is attempting to deliver an extensible, consistent, federated support system for operating systems using native tools, that are supported across campus helping to reduce overall costs and provide superior service to our users. Topics will include: Challenges faced, development methodology, strategic and technical solutions for building a consistent and flexible deployment framework and workflow.