Lipscomb revitalizes campus computer network
Chris Pepple |
When Mike Green accepted the position of chief information officer at Lipscomb in May 2007, he knew he had a dying patient on his hands when he examined the status of the campus computer network. He needed to breathe life into the system quickly, yet in a cost-effective way for the university. He accepted the challenge, and his team has revitalized the campus network to meet the challenges of a growing academic community.
“When I joined the Lipscomb staff, the IT advisory committee and I evaluated our systems and decided that my first priority should be to completely redo the existing campus network. The Lipscomb administrators and board members have been very supportive in helping my department rebuild the entire foundation of our computer network,” said Green.
Students, faculty, staff and visitors to campus all benefit from the recent changes. Lipscomb now has a campus-wide high-speed network and will soon have full campus-wide wireless capabilities. On-campus computer users can now access the internet five times faster than under the previous system. Lipscomb has put in redundancy and increased bandwidth so more people can access the internet on campus without delays. Another change to increase the efficiency of Lipscomb’s overall computer network involved moving student email accounts to Google GMail accounts. This gives our students a full function web-based mail application and more than 6GB of storage. This is also more reliable (maintained by Google 24x7x365) and at no-charge to the university. This move also positions our email accounts for lifetime usage if desired. Adding Media Site to our system gave our academic community access to video and playback capabilities. Professors can film classes and make them available as a student resource. Lipscomb also has other multimedia resources available such as access to Apple’s iTunes University.
Lipscomb also became one of the first universities to contract with an outside company to manage our network operations. Pomeroy helps Lipscomb simplify and optimize our IT infrastructure, bringing cost savings and improvements in efficiency, availability and productivity. Pomeroy also assists us in laying a solid foundation for the rapid deployment of changes that will be necessary to answer future needs of Lipscomb students, faculty and staff, as well as the business community who comes to campus to host or attend conferences and lectures.
“The technological needs of our campus have increased significantly over the past few years. We have more people on campus that require wireless access, more people that rely on the internet daily and more professionals on campus who have computing needs. We rebuilt the foundation of our computer network to meet these needs. We now have a faster, more reliable system and an external provider to assist us in managing it. Everything we have done has been cost-effective for the university and has benefited our entire academic community,” said Green.
Green came to Lipscomb after serving as the Chief Operating Officer for PROFORMANCE, Inc., a document-imaging provider to the banking industry. Before that, he served as a senior director of IT for Hewlett Packard, overseeing the Americas Region Services IT organization. He also served as the IT Director of Internet Systems, CRM systems, and corporate testing and release management for Corporate Services at HP. Prior to his work at Hewlett Packard, Green served as a consulting practice director for Andersen Consulting, Digital Equipment Corporation, and DSC Communications specializing in multimedia and broadband networking. He has also worked in defense systems at the Oak Ridge National Labs and E-Systems. Green was also a full-time instructor of computer science (graduate and undergraduate) at the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg.