If you build it they will come


The other day I had a conversation with a friend about creating a meta-directory at our campus. I said, it will enable our customers to collaborate in new ways. He said we don't need it because our customers don't collaborate with folks outside of our department anyway. I thought, perhaps that is because they can't.

I am at O'Reilly's Mac OS X conference in Santa Clara . To paraphrase what Tim O'Reilly said this morning, "when you invent something don't think in terms of the world as it is now, think in terms of what the world will be like after the invention."
Right now users at SJSU are defined at the department level. When a user needs access to a resource on a department LAN an account for that user is created in the domains that exist in the department or college. If a student or faculty member needs access to resources on six LANs that requires six user ID's with six passwords and all adds, changes and deletes are repeated six times.
The same is true of faculty access to network resources. An art professor can't be added to a group in Journalism without being added to that LAN as a separate user. This is terribly inefficient and creates barriers throughout the enterprise.
"Collaborate or die," these are the words of the person speaking now. I think we should be building the capabilities to allow our faculty to decide how they should collaborate, not force them to conform to the limitations of our system.

Posted: Tue - October 28, 2003 at 05:10 PM      

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