Future of Our Unit
Most of you have probably heard that Nancy Schimmelman, developer of the Our Unit system used by many L&S departments for faculty searches and graduate admissions (among other uses), was a victim of budget cuts in her department. Because Nancy handled all of the programming and most of the support for Our Unit, her absence leaves a pretty big gap.
Fortunately, IST’s Applications Services division has agreed to take on support and development of Our Unit. It will take them a while to figure out the code and deal with some of the issues related to supporting it centrally, so for now they’ve instituted a code freeze–no new features will be added until they understand things better. You’ll still be able to use the existing system, and IST should be able to set up new instances for departments who aren’t currently using the system. Our local team of Farnaz Stosik and Caroline Boyden will continue to provide user-level support for L&S folks.
I met with Bill Allison from IST-AS today, and he said that for at least the next 3-6 months, there will be no cost for using Our Unit. Long-term, IST may require some recharge revenue for support and development of the system; there has not yet been a business model developed. The goal will be to keep it “cheap.”
Nancy herself has landed on her feet; she’ll be doing IT management for Summer Sessions.
