University overhauls student portal

There's plenty of trouble to get into at college, but Northeastern University's CIO has a plan to keep students out of one particularly nasty place.

"Windows DLL hell is what we're trying to avoid," says Bob Weir, the university's CIO, referring to conflicts that can occur with Direct Link Libraries (DLLs) when installing applications on student PCs.

This fall, the university in Boston is adding a new feature to its already-popular student/faculty portal, aimed at easing the installation of software required for classes on personal machines. The application and content management platform will service 25,000 students and staff, offering 1G byte or more of online personal storage. It is also expected to save the school from overspending on application licenses, Weir says.

DLL hell refers to problems that occur when installing new applications on students' machines. Students often resent having applications on their personal PCs corrupted or disturbed.

"We have hundreds of applications to install on [student machines] each semester," Weir says. "We can't do full regression testing on every student's machine for every new application. We want to provide new features and tools, but not destroy an environment installing new software that might break what's already set up on a student's PC or laptop."

Weir's department is trying to phase out distribution of software via CD.

"We're trying to provide students and faculty a way to deliver their applications and make their work available to them anywhere," Weir says. In the past, students were often given CDs with software to install from professors or the IT department. Some departments provided network shares, but available only on the campus LAN.

In evolving from its roots as a day commuter school, the university now has almost three-quarters of its students on campus, which has driven up demands for new applications and network bandwidth.

The myneu.edu portal, introduced in 2002, has completed a big chunk of its mission: eliminating what was known as "the NU shuffle" - a constant stream of students walking from the registrar, to the bursar to the financial and other offices on the first days of a semester. Now all registration tasks are Web-enabled and can be done from a computer. The portal makes heavy use of XML-based Web services technology to tie together disparate legacy systems - such as registration system, a COBOL application that's a quarter of a century old - into a single browser-based interface.

On campus, the school has more than 25,000 Nortel 10/100M bit/sec Ethernet ports and uses Nortel SSL acceleration equipment to provide fast access to its Web offerings.

The university now is tying server software Xythos and Softricity into the portal. The platform will be used to set up personalized computing environments on student and faculty laptops, delivering centrally stored applications over the Web and providing Web-based access to files.

When students register for a class requiring software - such as an engineering student requiring MathWorks' MATLab mathematical computing - the applicant will appear in the "My Applications" section of his or her personal intranet page. When the application is launched for the first time, Softricity streams the application software to the student's hard drive and installs it in a compartmentalized, virtual-machine-like space on the hard computer. This keeps the new software from conflicting with other applications on the machine, including other versions of the same software that the student may have installed, Weir says.