Berlin University Computers

I am just accessting the internet at Berlin University and I am astonished how far ahead they are in Comparison to Bournemouth with their IT. Here some thoughts.
Ok when connecting to the wireless network Berlin has descriptions for follwing OSes

• Windows 2000 (Enterasys RoamAbout)
• Windows VISTA
• Windows XP
• Suse-Linux 9.1
• Suse-Linux 8.1
• Debian-Linux
• Suse-Linux 7.1 (Kernel 2.2.x)
• Mac OS X

They have a thought trough security policy that secures the network with a little logon page over https. And a then you can choose if you want to keep the https connection or log on over a wep key.

Bournemouth has no description what so ever (search time 10 min) Further the wireless network is not encrypted so you can easilly find out every password. (Student mail is not encryped so lets all sit in the Library and read other peoples mail).

Further the software is a great mix.
Here a little list of programms.

• Staroffice / Microsoft Office : So you can choose what you want. Brilliant Idea
• Whole Latex Package with DVI viewer and GhostView
• 2 Different ssh clients (Putty/F-Secure)
• Seamonkey/Mozilla/Firefox(2.0.0.4) : I would love to see this at Bmth (Firefox 1.2)
  

While bournemouth is struggeling to get Firefox working at Berlin they give you a choice what to use.

For their e-Lerning envirnonment they use Moodel (What is open source) in comparison to Blackboard (Trying to sue everyone for a patent they have on e-learning).

For their webpage they use plone (plone.org) which you can actually use. Yes they actually use a content managment system. For those who haven't had the experience of the Bournemouht Uni webpage. It is utterly unusable, nothing works (search), you can't find a thing. I use google most of the time to navigate the page.

Just some thoughts on how much IT-Services suck at Bournemouth.