ITECS Overview

ITECS provides computing support and services to the College of Engineering (COE), first as Engineering Computer Operations (ECO) in the 1980s and now as Information Technology and Engineering Computer Services (ITECS). ITECS delivers most of the college's academic and administrative IT services via a distributed client-server network called Eos. Eos is part of a larger, campus-wide computing environment called Unity, supported by the Information Technology Division (ITD)

Academic Computing and Eos

The primary mission of ITECS is to build and support the Eos academic computing environment used by engineering students in Eos labs and via remote access. Directed by the faculty Computer Committee, ITECS acquires and installs the application software that faculty need for teaching. This software may run on one, two, or all three Eos platforms: Sun Solaris, Microsoft Windows, and Red Hat Linux. In addition, ITECS supports a student-owned computing initiative to develop a wireless laptop environment for instructional computing.

ITECS assists department IT staff in supporting the discipline-specific needs of faculty, staff, and students in individual departments. ITECS also works with university-level IT groups, such as DELTA and ITD, to share and develop technologies that benefit both college and university computing.

Administrative Computing

In addition to its academic mission, ITECS develops and supports a Windows-based administrative computing platform for nearly 150 college and department administrative staff.

Peoplesoft applications needed by staff are provided by ETSS but administered to staff desktops through ITECS. The administrative desktop runs on top of or in parallel with many of the same technologies provided for academic computing. Using the same Eos infrastructure for both administrative and academic computing makes it easier for staff and faculty to move among teaching, research, and administrative computing tasks.

Faculty and staff in the engineering academic departments are supported directly by their own department support staff. These contacts work with ITECS and ITD to make centralized support more effective and provide users with multiple tiers of support.