TechPoint is a nonprofit organization dedicated to encouraging technological innovation in Indiana.
The projects include Kumo, the commercialization of One.IU and IU Online Virtual PC.
The awards celebrate several different kinds of technology with 12 separate categories. In the past, IU has generally been nominated for the Education Tech Award, but two of this year’s finalists, Kumo and One.IU, will be competing in the Tech Services category, which “recognizes excellence and innovation in a traditional/conventional IT project or initiative,” according to TechPoint’s website.
“It’s interesting to say that the One and the Kumo projects are actually finalists in a category that is not just a higher education category,” said Dennis Cromwell, associate vice president for University Information Technology Services Client Services and Support.
Cromwell said those in the Tech Services category would be competing against companies and startups that wouldn’t be present in the education category.
“It really is a nice recognition that they’re pretty creative things that we’ve done to service the faculty, staff and students at Indiana University, to be actually selected in these categories,” he said.
One.IU was commercialized this year to be used at other campuses as an application program, and IU Online Virtual PC includes IUanyWare, which allows students to use certain software from their laptops, even if they don’t have it downloaded.
The unit Cromwell leads manages the Kumo project, so he said he knows more about it than the other two finalists. It links programs such as IU’s Box, Google Drive, Dropbox and OneDrive.
John Hoerr is the architect and lead developer of Kumo. He said the motivation behind it came from a need for easy access for students to retrieve their stored files from any account.
“We kind of wanted it to be something that was easy to set up and self-service, familiar enough that it wouldn’t be, well, confusing,” Hoerr said.
The service can be found at cloudstorage.iu.edu, which allows students to link all of their storage accounts.
Hoerr said Kumo took basically two rounds to develop. The first was a version that only IU had access to and took six or seven months to complete. After visiting conferences to share the idea, other schools became interested and wanted a similar service for their campuses.
The development team rebuilt and rereleased the program in a way that other schools could take advantage of, which is the reason Kumo was nominated for the award.
However, Hoerr said it wasn’t easy finding this solution.
“You go down a lot of blind alleys,” he said. “You make a lot of mistakes before you find the thing that works. Sometimes, when you can be working on a problem ... there are almost more constraints than there are possibilities at first, and so we really sort of said, we looked at all the things that were bounding us, bounding a solution, and kind of said, ‘What’s left?’ And we found a solution within all of those constraints.”
The winners of the awards will be announced at a black tie event May 2 in Indianapolis.
Cromwell said the publicity UITS gets from the awards is a good way to communicate to students about technologies they may not be taking advantage of.
“I’m really proud of what we’ve been able to accomplish in delivering technology that matters for Indiana University,” Cromwell said.
Hoerr said he is also proud to be a finalist for the Mira Awards, but he is mostly happy with the product they created.
While those behind widely-used programs at IU may not often be given a second thought by students, he said that’s the way it should be if he and his coworkers are doing their jobs right.
“I think what we’ve done is really cool,” he said. “I think it’s still got a lot of potential to do new cool things, and, win or lose, I’m happy to be associated with it and to have done this for IU.”
