PENNPRINTOUT - University of Pennsylvania

24
ANNOUNCEMENTS
Penn to host EDUCOM’96
The annual conference of EDUCOM, a consortium of
universities and colleges concerned with applications of
information technology, will be held at the new Pennsylvania
Convention Center in center city Philadelphia, October
8-11, 1996. The largest higher-education-computing
conference, EDUCOM attracts over 2,500 university
computing specialists, faculty members, computing
vendors, and government representatives from around the
world.
As host institution, Penn will be invited to showcase
innovative uses of computing and networking—in instruction,
research, administration, patient care, and public
service—in an exhibit area at the Convention Center, via
the Internet, or by hosting campus tours. A committee will
soon be formed to organize Penn’s participation in the
EDUCOM conference.
To volunteer for the committee, or for further information
about EDUCOM and the 1996 conference, contact
local arrangements chair Daniel Updegrove, Associate
Vice Provost for Information Systems and Computing,
danu@dccs.upenn.edu, 898-2883, or 898-9348 (fax).
ISN to be discontinued
The ISN network service (“DIAL” prompt) will be
discontinued December 26, 1995. Users now attached to
PennNet via DIAL prompts must migrate to either
terminal server asynchronous access (“Annex” prompt) or
a direct Ethernet connection. Departments are urged to
begin planning this migration as soon as possible, since
user training, desktop software, and desktop hardware
must all be considered—and built into budgets. Consulting
on migration strategies is available from Data Communications
and Computing Services (DCCS).
ISN users are strongly advised to migrate to higherspeed
Ethernet connections to take advantage of desktop
software clients with graphical user interfaces. Such
software is already widely used on campus in popular
clients such as Netscape and Mosaic (World-Wide Web
browsers) and Eudora (e-mail). Moreover, new administrative
systems being developed as part of Project Cornerstone
will require Ethernet access.
Asynchronous services are of declining value in a
client-server environment, have increasingly prohibitive
maintenance and support costs, and divert resources
required to test and deploy emerging technology.
Departments with older desktop computers unable to
support an Ethernet interface, or with applications that use
proprietary asynchronous interfaces may elect to migrate
from ISN to terminal server connections during 1995.
Although this may be easier and cheaper in the short run, it
is important to note that general-purpose terminal server
access will be discontinued at the end of 1996 (as approved
by the Network Policy Committee at the recommendation
of DCCS).
For assistance with migration planning, or for any
other question about asynchronous and Ethernet connection
to PennNet, please contact the PennNet Help Desk
(help@dccs.upenn.edu or 898-8171).
DCE conference, June 1-2
“OSF DCE: Implementing a Distributed, Networked
Computing Environment” is the theme of a conference to
be held at the Penn Tower Hotel on the campus and hosted
by the Office of Information Systems and Computing
(ISC). The regional conference on June 1-2 and an
accompanying in-depth workshop on May 31 are sponsored
by CAUSE, the association for managing and using
information resources in higher education. Penn, a longstanding
member of CAUSE, also hosted last year’s
regional conference on “Networked Information.”
The CAUSE Board of Directors recently endorsed the
Open Software Foundation’s Distributed Computing
Environment (OSF DCE) standards and is encouraging all
CAUSE member colleges and universities to consider
adoption of the standards as part of their information
resources architecture. The conference focuses on
benefits, trends, and issues surrounding DCE, from the
varied perspectives of speakers from Boston College,
Michigan, Ohio State, Penn, Penn State, NASA, OSF, and
Transarc Corporation.
The conference is co-chaired by Daniel A. Updegrove,
Associate Vice Provost, ISC, and Samuel Plice, Chief
Operating Officer, Information Technology Division,
University of Michigan. Chris Shull of ISC, leader of
Penn’s distributed computing task force, is also on the
program committee.
PENNPRINTOUT