Campus technology improving, but not without glitches

In the years leading up to 2000, people started making sure their computer systems and program encodings didn’t crash when the clock struck midnight on Dec. 31, 1999, bringing in the new millennium.

Now 12 years after Y2K, technology is far more advanced.

When chief information officer Ravi Pendse started working for Wichita State seven years ago, his goal was to help establish WSU as the technology showcase in the state of Kansas.

“We looked at the fact that back [seven to nine years] we did everything by hand. Every facet of campus was involved, and the results are what you see now,” Pendse said, remembering the long lines of students waiting to enroll outside of Jardine Hall.

These lines no longer exist because the computer systems Pendse and his team implemented allow students to enroll, drop, check grades, and print classroom documents online.

When the computer systems were integrated at WSU, Emporia State also wanted to leave its manual systems.

“If we do better, and if we help Emporia do better, then Kansas does better” is the mindset Pendse and his team used.

“After we finished our system upgrading in late 2005, Emporia finished their upgrade a year after,” he said.

With grand strides, WSU has improved many areas, which are now included in technical support. However, more improvements can be made.

Sophomore Rekisha Pootoon lives at Fairmount Towers and experiences wireless Internet issues.

“I do not get a good Wi-Fi connection in my room in Fairmount Towers, and it is really irritating,” Pootoon said. “I do use an Ethernet cable to get a good connection, but not all devices, such as iPads, have that capability.”

When the system upgrades were finished on the wireless connection, students were telling Pendse about the problems. Some areas where the wireless connection was at the time did not allow students to connect, or they did not exist.

“We then decided that in 18 months, we wanted to be 100 percent wireless,” Pendse said.

Because of the systems upgrade, the old access points required replacement by new access points. The old wireless system allowed only 10 megabytes per second, and the new wireless system added speed up to 300 megabytes.

In 2007, the finished product was available for use under the names familiar to most of the WSU community—WSU Guest and WSU Secure.

Students, faculty and staff now have more bandwidth to download lectures, classroom videos and more while connected to the WSU wireless.

“When students or faculty cannot connect to the wireless, that means that there is a hole in the access point, meaning a hole in the coverage,” Pendse said.

He recommends that students notify him, and his team will immediately go and check out the access points and replace them if necessary.

As Pootoon said, there is an Internet port in every dorm room, whether it is in Fairmount Towers, Wheatshocker Apartments or Brennan Hall, where students can plug in an Ethernet cable to their PC. It has more memory space than the wireless Internet.

The port, when connected, gives students up to 1 gigabyte of space. If students do not have an Ethernet cable, Pendse said the Technical Support Center in Ablah Library will give one to students for free.

Another issue students are having is connecting to WSU Secure.

“If you cannot connect to WSU Secure, that most likely means that you tend to use WSU Guest over and over,” Pendse said.

When that happens, the preferred connection is WSU Guest. Pendse recommends that students having trouble connecting to WSU Secure delete WSU Guest from their wireless Internet choices.

If the trouble continues, technical support staff members are available to check out the laptops, iPads or computers to see if there are any upgrades needed so the connection may occur.

One glitch that Pendse and his team are investigating is the split of WSU emails when students decide to forward their emails to an outside account.

Senior Kathryn Luu experienced this split. She missed an email from a professor stating they had a test the next day because half of her emails were sent to her forwarding email and the rest stayed in her WSU email account.

“Although students are strongly recommended not to forward their emails because we want them to go to their myWSU and check their emails there, what we would expect is for either all the emails to forward or none at all,” Pendse said.