Office 2007

While the university isn't planning to update to Office 2007 until next academic year, some of you might have students who are already using it. If the students are not careful when saving their documents, they will save it to the new 2007 format, which can not be read by the Office 2003 suite that most of you are using. The first solution is to remind students to save it in a format that is most widely used (office 2003). The second solution is to download a program from Microsoft that will convert the files to make them readable to Office 2003. That can be downloaded here.

Another Reminder: Redundancy

Its time for me to offer you yet another reminder: YOU and only YOU are responsible for securing and backing up your own data. The college can not afford to be responsible, and frankly we wouldn't want it to be, for if it were we would need to mandate very different computer usage from the staff and faculty.

If you want some suggestions on how to backup your data, you can find my previous post here. Let me elaborate on a few other points that I didn't discuss in that post.

Any backup system should involve these checks:

1. Verification. Regularly verify the validity of your backup. This is particularly important in the case of "automatic" backup. We've recently had a case were everyone thought the software was backing up the data as it was supposed to, yet it was not.

2. Redundancy. Backups need backups. Obviously one could get carried away, but I think the point is to implement redundancy into your behavior. For example: I maintain a GMAIL account in addition to my university account. Important documents can be saved on my hard drive, backed up on my portable hard drive, and when I email the document to a colleague or when I just want to back it up I carbon copy my gmail account. Then the work is in at least 3 places. Since Google (yes I'm a fanboy can you tell?) maintains gmail it is responsible for backing up my account providing, yet another level of redundancy. Of course one could put it in their online storage space as well, for which the university runs a backup.

3. Diversify. Having only a portable backup device located next to your desktop computer does not protect you against some event that destroys your office, say a fire, or water damage from a leaky ceiling. This is why its important to maintain an off site backup as well. I understand MAYO clinic maintains backups of their data in 2 different countries in very separate parts of the world, with very different geopolitical risks.

Some suggestions for facilitating these principles.

For grades I do the following: I maintain a grade book on D2L, which is automatically backed up by the UW in Madison. It is easy to set up and eliminates the need to (illegally?) post grades on your door. Plus I then regularly download a copy to my hard drive which is also backed up with the rest of my hard drive. Giving me two copies, each with its own back up.

I've mentioned gmail before, it is still in beta, but I can send anyone an invite that would like one. It is far superior to any other web email, it is easily accessible on any computer, and it offers much more space than our own online email (2.8GB). And unlike our own Microsoft Exchange email gmail actually filters 99% of the spam out of your inbox.

Another online data storage alternative is: http://www.mediamax.com/ which offers 25GB of free space.

For an industry that is based on knowledge accumulation and transfer, much of which is done electronically these days, we are VERY bad at preserving our personal contributions. Maybe this is because our incomes are little effected by the loss? Either way, it is your responsibility to maintain the integrity of your data, please work harder at it, I know I need to.