blog Yup, it’s that time of year again — that brief window of opportunity where Australia’s universities, many of which are working off three semesters a year now, get a couple of weeks around Christmas to upgrade their IT systems.

Those of you who work in university IT departments know what I am talking about — the modern university needs to keep most of its customer-facing systems running 24 hours a day, almost 365 days a year, to meet the current level of student and staff demand for online services. So much has to be kept up; internal communications platforms for academics that work long hours, internal subject-specific forums, library platforms which are increasingly delivering information through the internet.

I have spoken to quite a few university IT admins and managers over the years who work Christmas Day and even New Year’s Day. Hard-working university IT departments of Australia: We salute you. And we hope the unis slip a few beers into the fridge to compensate ;)

Like Macquarie University in Sydney, Western Australia’s Curtin University has also been swamped with iPads, with chief information officer Peter Nikoletatos yesterday stating between 300 and 400 of the tablets had made their way into university staff hands since Apple launched the iPad in Australia in May.

Some of the tablets have been paid for by staff out of their own wallet, while some have been purchased for the university, the CIO told journalists at Gartner’s annual Symposium event in Sydney yesterday. “At the moment it’s in the hundreds … three to four hundred staff have iPads at the moment,” he said. The university has published a working paper for the staff with details of applications that they might find useful.

The comments echo similar sentiments made by Macquarie University CIO Marc Bailey in late October. At the time, Bailey said the institution had initially been responding to staff requests for the tablet on an ad-hoc basis.

But the situation snowballed and it quickly had to develop a more standardised corporate approach. “It became pretty clear within weeks of launch that it was going to become huge,” he said.

By September, the university had developed what Bailey described as a “coordinated turnkey approach” to the situation, working closely with Apple to do so. Staff can now order iPads directly from Macquarie’s Information Technology Services division. If a tablet breaks, they send it back centrally for a replacement — the same as with most other organisational computing resources.

Corporate Express CIO Garry Whatley — also at the Gartner briefing — said his company was also running an iPad trial, although it only had about a dozen or so of the devices. “I’ve found I use very little paper these days — I take it into meetings,” he said. And the CIO has stopped reading printed magazines, preferring to consume the media through the iPad interface.

Nikoletatos — who waved around his own iPad during the presentation — said some of the benefits of the tablet were that it was highly transportable, lightweight, and information could be accessed in seconds. In general, he said, he was seeing a trend towards information and applications being delivered through the web browser platform. “We’re moving away from fat client applications — the browser will be king in five years’ time,” he said.

Adelaide University has taken the step of actually calling it quits with paper textbooks — the institution will hand out free iPads to students enrolling in a science degree in 2011, claiming the new Apple tablets will revolutionise the way science is taught.

Nikoletatos said Curtin would love to do that — although a discussion would be needed as to whether the cost of the tablets was included as part of the fees for the subjects. “If the government wants to provide them for it for free, then I’ll take that phone call,” he laughed.

Caveats
But not all is perfectly rosy in the iPad world just yet. It has become common practice amongst executives in many industries to transfer files to their Dropbox cloud sharing account and then view the documents on the iPad. Nikoletatos said the university was mindful of the sort of data that could be moved into Dropbox and the sort that it shouldn’t.

“Security’s been one of our concerns,” agreed Whatley. However, the CIO noted most of the problems had been alleviated — iPads could be “remote killed” and virtual private networks used, for example.

In addition, Nikoletatos said that while Apple was “an extremely innovative company”, it was also “highly secretive”, noting nobody was quite sure when the company was planning to launch new products, and there had been “about nine different dates” guessed at for the next 4.2 version of the company’s iOS mobile platform, which is slated to add a number of enterprise manageability features.

In addition, Nikoletatos confirmed it wasn’t yet possible to retrieve applications from individuals’ personal iTunes accounts if they had been paid for from the university’s purse but then left. “At the end of the day, it’s an individual’s responsibility to return every asset,” he said.

In addition, although Curtin had successfully procured a corporate 3G data plan which included a “bucket” model for consuming mobile data, Nikoletatos said some configuration had had to be carried out to make sure the right Access Point Name (APN) identifier was being used.

Image credit: Apple

Western Australia’s Curtin University of Technology and ANZ Bank have both flagged plans to deploy Microsoft’s Surface multi-touch tabletop system, which went on sale in Australia today.

The platform — which was first announced in May 2007 — has been available internationally for some time, and has been used for purposes as varied as military tactical overviews and in restaurants. It provides a computer screen as large as a small table that acts as a touch screen that users can interact with.

Curtin chief information officer Peter Nikoletatos said the platform would foster new collaboration opportunities and provide “an engaging educational tool”, in a statement issued by Microsoft this morning, although he did not reveal exactly how the university would use the technology.

ANZ group general manager of innovation and former CIO, Peter Dalton, said the bank would use the experience gained from using Surface to work out how it could use touch and surface-based technologies to make managing money simpler and more exciting. The bank had already showed off two Surface units at the Australian Open tennis in Melbourne last month.

Four Australian partners have signed up build applications and solutions on top of surface. They are local digital marketing agency Amnesia Razorfish, IT services outfit Object Consulting, software firm nsquared and digital product design agency Automatic Studio.

Microsoft Australia managing director Tracey Fellows said the software giant had received “strong interest” from Australian organisations in Surface, including from developers that wanted to create applications “not possible with other technologies”.

In the statement, Microsoft did not disclose Australian pricing for Surface, however technology site techAU reported a retail Surface unit would sell for AU$21,000, compared to US$12,500 in the United States, with the developer unit selling for A$24,000 locally and US$15,000 in the US.

Image credit: Microsoft