September 3rd, 2009 | 
Author: After several months of preparation and planning, we’re proud to announce the launch of the new NC State Mobile website – a collaborative project encompassing the efforts of groups all across campus.
The NC State mobile presence is a convenient place to find campus news and contacts while on the go. You can find the closest bus stop and watch a video on NCSU’s mobile YouTube channel while you wait!
The new NC State mobile site supports any type of web enabled device from the most basic cell phone to the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry.
No matter where you are, you can get your NC State fix with ease.
We’re already at work on improving your mobile NC State experience, too. Soon, we’ll be adding features like maps, dining hall menu information, and sports scores.
Check it out now at m.ncsu.edu from any mobile device!
Posted in 
In a post last year, we made the comment that we were famous because we were mentioned in a Zend DevZone article that was a roundup of ZendCon 2008. I guess if that made us famous, we are rock stars now! (HA!)
Move That Bus, an article that we wrote, is being featured on Zend’s DevZone site! Head on over and read about how we got our start, how we discovered the right way to work, and why we are skeptical of employees at KFC.
This is another article in our series aimed at introducing our readers to some of the applications that we work on. A lot of the applications we write go unnoticed by the masses because they are aimed at a specific workflow or group, so we thought it would be cool to let everyone know what we are up to!
About a year and a half ago, our central IT organization decided to create a new way for students, staff, and faculty to get help with their computers. Previously, the support model had been to call the Help Desk with a problem, and the Help Desk would schedule a technician to come to the student’s dorm and help them out. While this worked for a good many years, it left out a good chunk of our students didn’t live on campus. It was decided that a new walk-in center (WIC) would be opened where customers could come in, drop off their computers, have technicians fix them, then come pick them up. The walk-in center would also be responsible for more user-facing services like password resets and software pickup, tasks that were normally handled by the Help Desk.
In order to implement the WIC’s new support model, our group was asked to devise a system to help them track computers and keep up with tasks. This system, named Crosswalk, would be totally responsible for managing any and all actions where technicians in the walk-in center helped a customer.
This is the first article in a series introducing our readers to some of the applications that we work on. A lot of the applications we write go unnoticed by the masses because they are targeted at a specific workflow or person, so we thought it would be cool to let everyone know what we are up to!
If you have been building applications long enough, you know that there are some things that you have to do with EVERY app you create. Authentication, authorization, user management, etc. No matter what the purpose of the app, you always have to deal with these things, and you are continually re-creating the same basic functionality with every new app. Perhaps it is a little different from app to app, but the concept is the same.
Perhaps we were totally late to the game, but we noticed this trend soon after we got into the Zend Framework. Zend Framework solved a lot of these problems for us. They had mechanisms for dealing with authentication and authorization, databases, forms, etc. It was great, so we created our first Zend Framework app, Billboard.
After we had totally drank the Zend Framework koolaid, we started working on another new app and realized that we wanted some of the interfaces we created in Billboard for our new app, so we went to the billboard project, copied what we needed, and moved on. That worked great until we found a bug in our login page. We fixed it, but the bug was still in our Billboard project. Quickly we changed projects and fixed the bug there. That is fine if we only have 2 projects, but we were planning to run all our projects with Zend Framework. What to do?
We here at Outreach Technology are big into open source software. If you’re not familiar with the concept of open source, the Open Source Initiative defines it as “a development method for software that harnesses the power of distributed peer review and transparency of process. The promise of open source is better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in.”
That’s exactly what we’re interested in for our digital sign management software, Billboard. We’ve been wanting to make it a real-life open source application that anyone can contribute to and join for a long time now and we’ve finally gotten the time to get it off the ground. Because there is some confusion on NC State’s campus about the differing hosted versions of the software, we are referring to our new open source version as BillboardCE, or Billboard Community Edition. This will ensure there is no confusion about version numbers.
We get very little storage dedicated to email on campus. I believe by default you get a few hundred megs, and I personally have about 350 megs dedicated to email. However I have almost gone over quote many times, and since retention laws are what they are for State Employees, something’s gotta give. That is why I decided to move all my campus mail to gmail, and here is how I did it.
Step 1: Create a new Google Account
I briefly thought about forwarding everything to my personal GMail account, but that is really not a good idea. The laws covering email in the state of North Carolina say that you have to retain all business-related email and that they can subpoena it at any time (at least that is my understanding), so I didn’t want people sifting through my personal emails in the name of public record. So I created a new GMail account, we’ll call this jason_work@gmail.com.
NOTE: I actually setup a GMail account on a separate domain that I owned that runs Google Apps for Domains. By doing this, I am able to stay logged in to my personal GMail account and my new jason_work account at the same time. Helpful when wanting to stay in touch in multiple places.
I’m not going to go through the steps of setting up a new GMail account. Just go to http://gmail.com and create a new account.
If you guys aren’t familiar with the State of NC’s operating procedures, we function on a fiscal year starting on July 1. This means that about this time every year, we get a note from above asking us to put together our accomplishments for the year. We just put ours together for 2008 – 2009, so I thought it may be interesting to share all those with you all!
Tags: Our campus is in the process of moving towards Groupwise for our email and calendar solution for faculty and staff. However, I wanted to just use my Google Calendar to keep up with all my appointments. This tutorial will take you through my process of delegating my appointments to Google Calendar.
Step 1: Delegating all appointments in Groupwise
Once you have Groupwise open, click on the Tools menu, and select Rules.
UNC Cause 2008 is officially over, so I thought I would share some of my thoughts as far as how the conference went.
UNC Cause is different in many ways to the standard “conference”. It seems a little less formal in lots of ways. Perhaps it’s the lack of keynote, or session tracks, or something I can’t really put my finger on. Either way, it continues to be different than things like ZendCon and the ResNet conference. Here is what was good, and not so good, about UNC Cause 2008:
Day 3, here we come!
Breakfast was good. There was OJ and biscuits this morning. There was also a raffle, but our group didn’t win anything.
Digital Signage with Billboard
We had a vested interest in this session. Andrew Stein from ECE presented about how they have taken our Billboard product and added a few features to satisfy their needs. Lots of good discussion about the reasons for digital signs and how Billboard will help. There were some requests for download links for Billboard, so if you want to download it, you can do that here.