CFS storage to be merged with Oncourse

University Information Technology Services has announced plans to merge the Common File System and the storage features made available on Oncourse. The change is slated to go into effect throughout the 2005-2006 school year. \nCFS, a storage service first made available to IU in 2000, will officially be retired May 15, 2006 -- although no new accounts will be created past Dec. 23, 2005. Shortly after, all existing files will become read-only as of Jan. 15, 2006, said Joann Farris, CFS migration committee chairwoman. \nAfter the date of retirement, centralized file storage at IU will begin to change. CFS and Oncourse's My Filemanager space will combine to create a single virtual storage facility for the IU community. The new storage unit will be available through Oncourse CL and will contain at least 250 megabytes more than CFS and My Filemanager combined. The new service will also provide easy access to files within course worksites and be just as easily available to share with others, Farris said. \n"Bringing these resources together means that new users have fewer systems to learn and support," said Brad Wheeler, IU associate vice president for community source initiatives and IU-Bloomington dean of information technology.\nAs of Wednesday, fewer than 700 people a week access the CFS service, and by the end of the year, each of these users will need to be prepared to make the switch. Notifying all the CFS users is a task not far from Farris' mind.\n"Support center staff and Student Technology Consulting are aware of the pending retirement and are available to help customers move their files," she said. "A notice has been placed within CFS that advises the customer of the pending retirement." \nIn the mid of the CFS retirement, Oncourse will make the final switch to Oncourse CL -- a program which will provide the foundation for IU's next chapter of teaching, learning and collaboration support, Wheeler said. \n"Oncourse CL makes IU a member of a global community of colleges and universities that are sharing resources and building new capabilities and tools to support teaching, learning and research," he said. "This will pay off in savings and easily obtaining open source teaching tools developed at other universities." \nThis merge is separate from the CFS retirement -- it was born because of the potential of a better form of Oncourse seen by the IU community. \n"The original Oncourse has been very successful, but as a homegrown system, IU was an island for maintaining and enhancing it," Wheeler said. "There are many things that it did not do that faculty want for online course support."\nHowever, with a move as large as this, how are most IU users adapting?\n"IU has a wonderful and vast diversity of faculty and disciplines that have come to use Oncourse Classic in a variety of ways," Wheeler said. "Some are finding an immediate fit with Oncourse CL, while others prefer to wait for additional features that will be in the December update."\nAlthough a glitch-free program can never be entirely assured, Oncourse CL has gone through multiple stages of quality assurance testing before deployment to IU users, Wheeler said.\n"No testing process assures that users won't encounter any bugs -- the same is true for commercial software," he said. "But our process seeks to do everything possible to minimize that possibility while providing timely updates and quality services."\nFor those who are experiencing difficulties making the switch, Wheeler assures the Oncourse CL team tracks every support call, message and concern, and it is fixing bugs along with other universities as they are identified. \nFor more information regarding the CFS retirement and merge with the new file-sharing capabilities of Oncourse CL, visit http://uits.iu.edu.