The Association forCommunications TechnologyProfessionals in Higher Education (ACUTA) has selected the University of Notre Dame as the sole recipient of the prestigious Institutional Excellence in Communications Technology award for 2007.

ACUTA, an association made up of 825 colleges and universities in all 50 states, bases the highly competitive annual award on the recipients success at making optimal or groundbreaking use of communications technologies.

A decisive factor for Notre Dames win was the Universitys innovative business case for removing standard telephones from residence hall rooms while partnering with wireless operators to significantly increase cellular coverage across campus,said Gordon Wishon, Notre Dames associate vice president, associate provost and chief information officer.It became very clear to us that students seldom used the in-room phones the University provided, and that continuing to provide them did not track with the habits of our students. Most students rely on cell phones and text messaging as their primary mode of telephone communications, and we really needed to focus our long-term efforts toward enabling that technology.

But the challenge of providing strong cellular signals across campus, indoors and out, to thousands of students, faculty and staff was another matter.

Notre Dame has had a history of keeping cell towers from encroaching on its beautiful campus,said Dewitt Latimer, the Universitys chief technology officer.

Pressed with the problem of cell coverage without towers, Latimer and hisengineers elected to pursue a carrier-neutral distributed cellular antenna systema network of small antennae that installers could hide on buildings and other campus structures.

After investigating our options, we decided to partner with ,Lattimer said.Their distributed antenna system gave us what we needed in performance, carrier neutrality and aesthetics. The antennae are difficult to spot unless someone shows you exactly where they are.

We have heard very positive remarks from students,said William Kirk, Notre Dames associate vice president for residence life.We have gone from students virtually hanging out of residence hall windows trying to get decent reception to five-bar coverage throughout most of campus.

The projects widespread success in maintaining University aesthetics while serving the rapidly changing and growing technological needs of the campus community caught ACUTAs attention.

We are proud to honor Notre Dame as winner of the Institutional Excellence Award for 2006-07,ACUTA Executive Director Jeri Semer said.The Universitys ambitious project to transform campus communications clearly reflects the University’s commitment not only to its faculty, staff, and students but also to its heritage as it provides 21st century technology to enable the accomplishment of its timeless mission.

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The University of Notre Dame is augmenting its emergency communications capabilities this summer with a technology service called Connect-ED, a system that allows communication administrators to contact large numbers of students and employees quickly through multiple electronic technologies.

Early technical testing is complete, and the Universitys goal is to have the system fully operational by the time students return to campus for fall classes.

Connect-ED solves the fundamental problem of reaching a highly mobile group of students through multiple communications channels,said Gordon Wishon, Notre Dames associate vice president, associate provost and chief information officer.Connect-ED can extract contact information from campus electronic directories and, on demand, send a voice or text message to a database of cell phones, office phones, home phones and e-mail addresses.

In addition, Connect-ED, a service of The NTI Group in Sherman Oaks,Calif., can send the same message to up to six different telephone numbers per person and do text messaging, text-to-speech recognition, and voice-to-text recognition.

Part of the Connect-ED effort this summer will be determining procedures for obtaining and retaining multiple faculty, staff and student contact points and setting University policies on how those contact points may be used.

Reaching all students on a university campus in time of an emergency has long been a challenge, according to Wishon. While a majority of Notre Dame undergraduateslive on campus, they always are on the move and their primary means of communication usually is a personal cell phone.

Faculty and staff also frequently use personal cell phones on campus and when commuting to and from work,Wishon said.

This springs tragic mass shooting at Virginia Tech both saddened and startled those of us in higher education,he added.We had an emergency communications project in the works, but Virginia Tech was an eye-opener. A lot of universities, Notre Dame included, put emergency communications systems at the top their IT project lists.

Wishon believes that Notre Dame is in a good position to take advantage of the Connect-ED technology. Last year, the university installed a distributed cellular antenna system that enables participating wireless providers, such as AT&T and Verizon, to cover the campus with strong cellular signals. Notre Dame, in cooperation with Comcast, also installed cable TV in every on-campus residence hall room, and it maintains a robust wired and wireless data network and e-mail systems.

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To quote Bob Dylan, “the times they are a-changin’.”

In 2005, Congress passed a law shifting the start of daylight -saving time (DST) from early April to March 11 and its end to Nov. 4 from late October. The change, a result of the Energy Policy Act, affects technology and computer programs with built-in coding that recognizes the previous DST season.

Keeping ordinary clocks and watches synchronized during these extra daylight days is a mild disruption. But tweaking personal computers, Notre Dame’s central computing systems and telephones to recognize the extra days in daylight saving can be a hassle for campus computer users and a lot of extra work for the Office of Information Technology (OIT).

“Users of computing devices on campus need to take action before March 11,” says Peggy Rowland, OlT’s director of customer support services.

OIT has prepared a Web-based guide for adapting to the change at , Rowland says. There, users of Windows PCs, Macintosh computers, Linux-based machines, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and telephones will find what they need to know and do to accommodate the time change.

Employees may find that their office and personal computers and other devices employ operating systems that will require patching or that will be unable to adapt to the new time schedule. The OIT Web site identifies programs that may become obsolete with this changeover.

For the OIT, preparing the campus has involved a multi-phase approach. The most all-encompassing chapter thus far has been prepping faculty and staff for an update of CorporateTime. Printers throughout campus reproduced calendar hardcopies as part of the transition late last month.

Since the beginning of the year, OIT engineers have spent approximately 200 hours patching 370 time-sensitive central computing systems. Database administrators spent at least 50 hours in February patching over 50 databases to accommodate the extra daylight saving days.

“Computers that process everything from paychecks to e-mail reference an onboard clock and the clock’s interaction with operating systems and applications,” says OIT Director of Operations and Engineering Mike Alexander.

Unlike last year, when OIT responded to Indiana’s switch to daylight-saving time, “the mandated change in the start date resulting from the Energy Policy Act is nationwide; information technology departments all over the country have been scrambling their resources.”

Alexander says, “Our testing shows we’re ready; we’ll know for sure at around 2:01 a.m. on March 11.”

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