About the Office of Information Technology

The UMBC Office of Information Technology (OIT) is responsible for developing and supporting the IT architecture and services used in teaching, research, and administration. UMBC is known for excellent teaching and innovative uses of technology to support teaching and learning. As a major research university it is critical that UMBC students, faculty and staff have access to an extensive array of computing services for research and scholarship, as well as for communication and collaboration. OIT is active in many national IT organizations: Internet2, Educause, and CASE to name just a few.

All faculty, staff, and students receive a computer account for use with myUMBC. Through myUMBC, a campus web portal for personal information and tools, students can use the web to register for classes, retrieve grades, check course availability, set up personal inks and use web-based email-from anywhere in the world. Faculty and staff use myUMBC to support a wide array of online business services. MyUMBC also links to Blackboard, an online courseware tool used in the majority of UMBC's courses for sharing documents, posting assignments and facilitating online discussions. In addition, through their myUMBC account, the UMBC community can send and receive email, save files and create personal web pages.

Bob Armstrong
New Media

Instructional Technology

For administration, UMBC is implementing PeopleSoft for human resource, financial, and student adminstration. UMBC is live with human resources and financial applications and will begin the implementation of the student system in academic year 2004-2005 with a phased completion occuring in all modules by fall 2007. For more information, visit http://www.umbc.edu/peoplesoft.

UMBC working with the University System of Maryland negoiates a number of site license agreements. All faculty and staff machines are covered under the University System of Maryland's Microsoft License Agreement and our McAfee Virus protection agreement. In addition, UMBC has negotiated extremely favorable hardware pricing with Dell and Apple for computers below regular pricing that can be purchased at the UMBC Campus Bookstore. Finally, UMBC has a number of special discounts with software vendors for a wide range of products such as Mathematica, Maple, Matlab, SPSS, SAS and the full suite of Adobe products.All campus site licenses are listed in myUMBC, select the business services tab and then click on the link software licenses.

Computer labs are available seven days a week with consulting support and high-speed postscript printing. A variety of platforms are provided, including Macintosh OSX, Windows 2000, and Linux workstations, a number of which have three-dimensional graphics and animation support. All computer labs link to the Internet via 100 MB connections. Available software includes all major programming languages, a variety of statistical packages, database and text processors and many special purpose packages supporting mathematics. These include Oracle, SAS, SPSS, Maple, Mathematica, MATLAB, Java, C, C++, Alias and many others.

Currently, wireless network access is available throughout much of the campus, including the entire New Commons building, which has up to 25 wireless laptops for free, two-hour loans inside the building. In the Spring 2004, UMBC was noted as one of the top 25 "wireless" schools by Intel. More information on wireless access can be found at the URL: http://www.umbc.edu/oit/sans/desktopsupport/pc_ppp/wireless/wireless.html.

UMBC has a state-of-art campus network providing Gigabit network access to all major building and research labs and switched ethernet connections to every room. All residential facilities have a dedicated 10 MB connection for each resident student. UMBC provides approximately 500 modems serving the Baltimore/ Washington region. UMBC is actively deploying a wireless network for students and faculty. All members of the community have access to high-speed Internet connectivity, a 155MB connection for Internet1 and 155 MB connection to Internet2.