"A lot has happened here in the last three months," said Dawn Irish, Manager of Information Technology Services (ITS) training.
ITS has been hard at work all summer to provide members of the Tufts community with several new services, including expanded wireless Internet on campus and a spam-blocking program.
Tufts students may have noticed the spam-blocker, Proofpoint, at work in their inboxes. Launched on Aug. 16, the program quarantines spam and lists the caught messages in e-mails sent to Tufts accounts. As of yesterday, Proofpoint had already blocked 6,325,695 messages across the Tufts system.
"It checks for over 200,000 message attributes and has a very low percentage of false positives," Irish said of the new program.
ITS also distributed e-mail account information to freshmen early this year. By June 1, the incoming class could sign up for their Tufts e-mail addresses, avoiding long lines during orientation.
Mely Tynan, Chief Information Officer for ITS, was inspired to start this new service after she waited in a line to set up her own e-mail address when she began working at Tufts.
Most freshmen took advantage of this opportunity. "By the end of June, over 92 percent of incoming freshmen signed up," Irish said.
The ongoing effort to expand wireless access on campus also continued this summer.
Engineers working on the wireless project conducted a survey of the whole Medford campus "to assess each building's manner of construction and permeability to radio waves, in order to...understand the potential aggregate costs and issues," said project manager Wilson Dillaway.
In response to high wireless traffic levels, adjustments were also made to locations already benefiting from wireless access.
"In the past six months we expanded the number of antennas and access points in Tisch Library, the Olin Center and the Campus Center to provide improved coverage," Dillaway said.
ITS has also included improvements specifically geared toward faculty and graduate students, enhancing and expanding their research and computing services.
"[We are] providing faculty and graduate students with more resources to do computation and data storage," said Tynan.
Undergraduate students will also enjoy additional storage space. Each student has been granted access to temporary storage space on a local area network. "Wherever you are, you can get to the file space," Tynan said.
Students will soon have wireless Internet access in Carmichael and Dewick-MacPhie Dining Halls. ITS also set up Ethernet drops at both of these locations.
Once computers are placed there, they can be used as kiosks. "The connectivity is there," Tynan said.
ITS also introduced a program called Degree Auditing Reporting Services in partnership with Student Information System (SIS).
Students can use this service to see how the courses they plan to take will match up with their remaining requirements and avoid a scramble in their senior year.
Although sophomore Adam Santos observes that some of the projects do not "seem like the most pressing thing [Tufts] could be doing," he still supports them.
"They're definitely trying to improve things. The more technology we're exposed to, the better," he said.
