OHS wireless interruption

What: Network maintenance causing an interruption in wireless connectivity.
When: Feb 11 from 4:00PM until 4:30PM
Who: Most people who use wireless at OHS after school hours will be affected.
Where: The entire northern half of the OHS building. (the north end is where the IMC is)
Why: We will replacing some old network equipment at OHS. This is will be the first of two maintenance windows required to complete the cut-over.

How: This question word really isn't needed, but I thought I'd stick it on the end to complete the set.

IT Initiatives 2010

Here is a brief presentation outlining the major initiatives of the next eight months. Remember, change is good!

Annenberg videos and lessons available free

Did you know we have a partnership with the Annenberg / CPB Foundation and UW Madison DoIT Streaming Media Services to make Annenberg's Video On Demand (VOD) courses available to you direct from the WiscNet network? Annenberg makes a large number of high quality VOD teacher resources available to the public from their web site at http://www.learner.org/ The VOD courses take the form of Microsoft Windows Media Player streaming videos.

Annenberg has worked with a number of local, regional and state networks to create local content mirrors. The way their setup works is that when you select a VOD course to view from the Annenberg site (http://www.learner.org/), their site detects that you are on the WiscNet network and redirects your request to the WiscNet content mirror. You then receive the video stream you selected from WiscNet's content mirror.

The benefit to you of WiscNet hosting an Annenberg content is that when you view an Annenberg VOD course your stream is coming to you directly from the WiscNet backbone, NOT from the Internet! This only applies when you are viewing them from school. You can still access all the content from off campus, but the performance may not be as good, depending on your Internet connection speeds.

Older browsers won't be supported in Google Apps

Google Apps sent out the following notice regarding the end of support for older browsers. I'm passing along this notice in case anyone is using an older browser at home. All district computers have been upgraded to supported browsers.

In order to continue to improve our products and deliver more sophisticated features and performance, we are harnessing some of the latest improvements in web browser technology.  This includes faster JavaScript processing and new standards like HTML5.  As a result, over the course of 2010, we will be phasing out support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 as well as other older browsers that are not supported by their own manufacturers.

We plan to begin phasing out support of these older browsers on the Google Docs suite and the Google Sites editor on March 1, 2010.  After that point, certain functionality within these applications may have higher latency and may not work correctly in these older browsers. Later in 2010, we will start to phase out support for these browsers for Google Mail and Google Calendar.

Google Apps will continue to support Internet Explorer 7.0 and above, Firefox 3.0 and above, Google Chrome 4.0 and above, and Safari 3.0 and above.

Starting this week, users on these older browsers will see a message in Google Docs and the Google Sites editor explaining this change and asking them to upgrade their browser.  We will also alert you again closer to March 1 to remind you of this change.

In 2009, the Google Apps team delivered more than 100 improvements to enhance your product experience.  We are aiming to beat that in 2010 and continue to deliver the best and most innovative collaboration products for businesses.

Thank you for your continued support!

Sincerely,

The Google Apps team

 So, if you are still running IE 6, Firefox 2, or some ancient version of Netscape, it's time to upgrade.