This newsletter highlights many of the new products recently announced by Microsoft and Carlow's plans for implementation. These changes are truly revolutionary and will dramatically change the way your computer interface looks and works.

In addition, you will read about the success of our new Computer Cafe in Grace Library, and our plans for upgrading the campus network! It's going to be an exciting new year!

Happy 2007!

Karen Sturgeon
Information Technology

The I.T. Help Desk is open Mon-Thurs 8am-9pm and Fridays 8am-4pm. Hours are subject to staff availability. The Help Desk can be reached by calling 412-578-8700, visiting the 2 floor of Antonian Hall, or email at: helpdesk@carlow.edu. You can also chat online with a representative by going to http://www.chat.carlow.edu/helpdesk/chat.html

The Information Technology department has just reached an agreement with our vendors to move our campus-wide network to a much faster gigabit network! This new network will be able to handle the larger data requirements of streaming video and audio that will evolve over the next few years.

An example of this would be when you watch a video news clip from one of your favorite news sites like cnn.com or cbs.com. Additionally, more and more faculty are placing video clips on Blackboard as class supplements.

Our standard desktop speed is currently at 100mb. The new network will operate at 1,000mb and the core of the network will increase its speed by 22-fold!

This upgrade will be performed in 5 phases. We will start this January with an upgrade to our central core and computer room environment. In July of 2007, we will be upgrading Curran Hall for the new nursing skills lab and complete the work in Antonian. In the third phase, we will upgrade AJP and phase 4 and 5 will upgrade all the remaining buildings on campus. More updates will follow as we move through the phases.