We are hard at work preparing for the Winter break and the upcoming spring semester.  Here is a summary of the major changes occurring over the break:

• New School of Engineering Computer Lab: Eaton 1010
• New Computing Services help desk: Eaton 1012
• Upgrade from Microsoft Office 2003 to 2007
• Upgrade from Inventor 2008 to 2010
• Pilot/Full roll out of Windows 7
• Eaton lab machine upgrades to four gigs of RAM
• New Website look and feel

The changes we a targeting for the break are having all of the School of Engineering's major Websites updated to the new look and feel, and several of the sites have already been updated.  Currently the CEAE, Engineering Physics, and Engineering Management are already complete.

The other major changes revolve around the student computing labs in Eaton.  ECS will acquire the management of one new lab in Eaton, 1010.  This lab was previously managed by the EECS IT staff.  Additionally we will pickup 1012, which we intend to convert into a help desk for ECS resources.

The other big news with the labs in Eaton is that we will be upgrading the amount of memory machines from 2 gigs up to 4 gigs.  This will give us the performance headroom to increase responsiveness in high utilization applications such as the AutoDesk suite.  This will also make all of the computers capable of running Windows 7, which we are expecting to roll out at least to the 1010 lab.

In addition to all of that, we will be upgrading all of our Microsoft Office installations up to 2007.  This change is a long time coming, and will serve to get us up to date on all of our Microsoft products.  The switch from 2003 to 2007 can be a big one because of the ribbon, but once you are used to the new interface it is a fantastic application suite.  We will also be bringing AutoDesk Inventor up to the current version, 2008 to 2010, to match the version of the rest of our AutoDesk suite.

Lighting Analysts have made their software available to students to download and run on their personal computers away from the University. This software is available from their website using the following instructions:

1. Open your browser to http://www.agi32.com
2. Find the Customer Login link
3. User = student-lai2464edu
4. Pass = student
5. If you receive an SSL warning import the key or allow the site
6. Click the EDU link
7. Download whichever software you want.

You will be prompted to request an installation key upon installation of the software and it should guide you through the process. Once the installation is complete the software will work until July.