The DCG vision is an all electronic (near paper-less) University with a unified environment for teaching, research, administration, courses, libraries, publication, sharing, and electronic information knowledge bases.
Every person (faculty, staff, student) is connected via the network with strong support for email and the web. There is a distributed common file system with login independence and remote access.
Each department is a self managed business unit with local autonomy and empowerment. The local systems grab updates from the University system while feeding information into the aggregate University umbrella. The power of the University is in the hands of the professors.
Every person has a computer with many application environments including a rich collection of word processing applications, spread sheets, databases, text databases, internet connectivity, calendars, graphics programs and image viewing programs.
The environment is a heterogeneous hardware ocean of many operating systems adhering to open and standard protocols.
The environment is open but secure. Anyone can get your publications, if you wish. No one can see information that you protect. Digital signatures on email messages authenticate the sender and the content. A unified security environment minimizes the risk of break-ins by hackers. A secure user name and password system gives a consistent authentication into the umbrella. Information could be encrypted.
The environment supports elaboration tolerance. What we do today will be obsolete tomorrow and thus change must be supported.
This is how it works.
You buy a hardware system from an approved list. Load the starter kit which includes many standard applications. Connect your system to the network. Announce yourself to the name service and get authorized for a collection of capabilities. This, of course, is done by a user who has that authority. Now create your kerberized password. Bingo, you are in the system and ready to surf.
At your fingertips is a robust, shared environment ready to make you very productive. You can teach, do research, publish, and gain access to a common brain trust of University knowledge. All communication, to all services, is done through a standard interface. A standard collection of templates is readily available. The common user interface to all services and on all hardware platforms could be the web. New applications are easy to create. New services are easy to install.
If you need access to the administration application, just add more capabilities.
The infrastructure runs in a near paper-less fashion and is automated to the max. The management is distributed.