UITS plans elimination of lockers

Students who've grumbled and grieved over storing, and often losing, files in their Locker accounts on the campus computers can now breathe a sigh of relief.\nUniversity Information Technology Services is in the process of eliminating the long-troublesome locker system and replacing it with a much-improved successor -- the Common File System.\nCFS is a new electronic file storage service that will be slowly implemented during the course of the semester. Like the Lockers, it will allow students to store and access their files from anywhere, without the need for a disk.\nEach student will have access to 100 megabytes of storage, compared to only 40 with the Lockers. The storage space could hold about 100 term papers, 50 simple PowerPoint presentations, 20 MP3s or about 2,000 plain text e-mail messages.\nBesides the additional space the CFS is designed to be accessible from any networked machine, said Anurag Shankar, manager for the distributed storage services group at UITS and chief architect of the CFS project.\n"The CFS is accessible from home," he said, because it\'s available over the Web. "The Lockers were not accessible via the Web at all. The CFS is making storage accessible from any location in the world."\nCFS has been fully operational since late summer, but, as with any new system, officials say there will be bugs. Shankar believes that as more students and faculty adopt the system, UITS will be able to pinpoint and fix problems quickly. And while the transfer is taking place, Locker accounts will remain in effect so that students can transfer files. \nBy Oct. 1, the Lockers will become read-only, allowing students to look at their contents but not add or subtract from their accounts. By January 2002, the Lockers will be permanently disabled.\nStudent Michael Valliant is already using the new system, and said he thinks it's better than the Lockers.\n"I can go anywhere on the planet and have access to my files, assuming an Internet connection is available," he said.\nValliant uses his storage space for class work and Web pages he's designing, and likes the stability the CFS offers.\n"I dislike floppy and Zip disks for their tendency to corrupt data, and lack of backup," he said. "CFS backs up my data nightly."\nStudents with active Locker accounts are not automatically transferred to the CFS.\nTo sign up for an account, visit accounts.ucs.indiana.edu and follow the prompts.\nNew Software Available\nAs part of IU\'s licensing agreement with Microsoft, students now have access to the most recent Microsoft products for little or no money. Microsoft Office XP Professional for Windows is now available to IU students, faculty, and staff at the IU bookstore and online. The software, available on a three-CD set, can be purchased at the bookstore for $15. It includes Word 2002, Excel 2002, PowerPoint 2002, Access 2002, Outlook 2002 and Frontpage 2002. The programs can also be downloaded for free from IUWare Online at iuware.iu.edu.