Congratulations to UCSC Information Technology Services for winning the 2017 Campus Innovation Award!
The award was given to ITS Core Technologies staff member Gina Quolas at the Mapcom Systems M4 Users Conference in October. The team included Gina Quolas, General Hopper, Vic Rempillo and Jameson Jendreas of Core Technologies and Deb Norland of Applications and Project Management. Way to go team!
ITS purchased M4 Web Console (mobile viewing application for cable management databases) earlier in 2017, and dozens of hours were originally required to configure the application so that it would work with the existing cable infrastructure. Because of the ITS team’s unflinching determination, the configuration took considerably less time than anticipated. As a result, Mapcom Developers added additional enhancements to the application making it a much more powerful tool for UCSC and more desirable for other Mapcom clients. UCSC became an innovative trend-setter amongst Mapcom clients, who have now chosen to add Web Console to their existing cable management system.
"With their use of M4 Web Console, University of California Santa Cruz exemplifies the core of what it means to be a campus user," said Chuck Flournoy, President of Mapcom Systems. "Through M4, they have completely overhauled their network to maximize efficiency and visibility for their team. UCSC demonstrated significant success in receiving unique M4 benefits that helped improve their quality of work throughout their team and gained efficiencies in mobility and speed of dispersed information."
Here are a few items that contributed to UCSC receiving the Campus Innovation Award:
- Clean data – information moves seamlessly between the M4 database and the Web Console application because our M4 project did not contain incomplete or orphaned records. The information in our project was input meticulously and it has been maintained well. Having a healthy project greatly reduced the number of configuration hours that were required to make the two programs work together.
- Extremely accurate GIS map – the campus map drawn by our GIS department was spot on. No corrections or building moves were required in order to line up with Google maps.
- The strong ITS partnership between Gina, Deb, and Jameson was critical for providing quick solutions during the configuration. They worked together as a team to keep three servers, two applications and one database connected smoothly while Mapcom software developers worked on the configuration.
- Enhancement requests – General and Gina worked together to approve the use of the remaining configuration hours to develop the fiber trace and bay (rack) viewer functions in Web Console. These enhancements will prove to be helpful tools to the ITS technicians in the field. The enhancements also made the Web Console application more desirable to other campuses and telephone companies who are using the M4 database to manage their network infrastructure.
- UCSC’s vision to see the benefit of a mobile viewing application for the cable management database has inspired other campuses and companies to move in the same direction for viewing their records.
