Cornell Information Technologies is implementing a central, campuswide service that all university employees can use to schedule meetings and maintain electronic calendars. Like e-mail, it will be centrally funded and offered at no charge to campus departments. The service will be ready in late spring 2000.
Many people at Cornell already use an electronic calendar (Meeting Maker, for example) to mange their daily schedule and set up meetings with their colleagues. However, these calendar systems are department-based and cannot all communicate with each other. The new service will use a single calendar-service system -- Corporate Time -- and will enable employees to schedule meetings with each other no matter where they work in the university.
Corporate Time (by Corporate Software and Technologies) was selected as the best product for Cornell's diverse needs by a campuswide taskforce that evaluated several approaches to scheduling meetings and resources, such as conference rooms. Corporate Time runs on Macintosh, Windows and UNIX and will be accessible through the World Wide Web. It also supports synchronization of handheld electronic organizers such as PalmPilots.
Watch for training sessions and publications about using Corporate Time in the spring. Details on the differences between Meeting Maker and Corporate Time and on converting Meeting Maker calendars will also be provided.
If you're interested in following the development phases of this service, send e-mail to listproc@cornell.edu with this message: SUBSCRIBE Calendaring-L Your Name.
Just how private are the files and e-mail on your computer at work? Can you host a personal web page on your Cornell computer? What is commercial use of the network? When does unwanted e-mail become harassment, and what should you do about it?
Tough issues like these are the focus of the Computer Policy and Law seminars. Open to any interested member of the Cornell community, these free events are held once a month from 3:30 to 5 p.m. in 100 Caldwell Hall. Margie Hodges Shaw and Steve Worona, both of the Office of Information Technologies, coordinate the series.
The October and November seminars attracted over a hundred faculty and staff members from throughout the university. The first seminar included a lively discussion of e-mail spam, focusing on the recent rash of "Robert Lavelle" diatribes and Cornell's limited ability to block "junk" e-mail, as well as an informative explanation of sticky copyright problems brought on by the World Wide Web.
The second seminar explored what would happen if pornography were discovered on a dean's home computer.
The Dec. 8 seminar will tackle privacy issues related to documents and e-mail stored on workplace computers, as well as efforts to create a policy that addresses these concerns.
To receive e-mail announcements of upcoming seminars, send e-mail to cpl-program@cornell.edu.
The "@cornell.edu" column is edited by Beth Goelzer Lyons of Cornell Information Technologies (CIT). Please send suggestions to citnews@cornell.edu. For more technology news, visit the CIT News web site http://www.cit.cornell.edu/citpubs/news/.
| Cornell Chronicle Front Page | | Table of Contents | | Cornell News Service Home Page |