Northeastern University Wins CIO Bold 100 Award
Open University Relies on Xythos Enterprise Document Manager to Implement Northeastern On Demand Initiative
August 23, 2005
San Diego, CA – August 23, 2005 – At the 17th Annual CIO 100 Awards, CIO Magazine, announced the selection of Northeastern University, one of Xythos Software’s innovative educational customers, as a CIO 100 award winner. CIO Magazine has identified the institution’s Northeastern On Demand initiative (based on Xythos technology) as “bold in its business strategy, embracing the change required to implement it and smart in dealing with the risks that boldness entails.” This is the second time in three years, Northeastern’s IT department has been acknowledged for identifying and implementing a wide-scale technology initiative by the publication.
“Xythos’ open standards-based products are designed for easy customization and integration so that our customers can deliver the specific functionality and service their organization requires,” commented Ed Miller, Xythos CEO. “Embedding document and file management capabilities in portals represents a logical next step in the evolution of a service-oriented architecture and we congratulate Bob Weir, Rick Mickool and the rest of the Northeastern team on their accomplishment.”
Viewed as an important campus-wide initiative and strategy, Northeastern On Demand provides a web-based virtual computing environment for users and addresses the university’s requirement for a consistent, customized and collaborative computing environment. By leveraging Xythos’ WebFile Server, Northeastern will provide users with a ‘virtual drive’ that can be centrally authenticated, easily shared and self-administered. Web-enabled file storage, improved data security, simplified support and the ability for its users to collaborate, regardless of location and time zone, are benefits that Northeastern expects from this initiative.
“Our university is made up of thousands of dynamically reconfiguring teams and we are doing our best to help them work together and get their jobs done. Whenever they can get on the Internet, they can enjoy the 'on campus' experience and get to what they need with Xythos – whether it’s from a cyber café in Moscow, a coffee shop in London or on their parent’s home PC. With Northeastern On Demand we will un-tether our users, providing them with a “C drive in the sky” that is centrally authenticated, protected and shareable”, stated Bob Weir, vice president of Information Services at Northeastern. “We came to this initiative from a web-based portal view. Xythos enables our users to self-administer web storage, including cross-community access management, and provides the basic document management features that help make the portal a richer and more collaborative environment”, he added.
As a research institution with a mobile and distributed global community, the university will begin to define the next generation of individual academic computing support when implementing Northeastern on Demand. When fully deployed to its campus community, over 50,000 users will be able to access key desktop applications and file storage as easy-to-use web services, available anytime, anywhere in the world.
Northeastern’s bold initiative also represents an increased willingness among distributed organizations to deliver more computing services over the web in order to reduce overall costs and respond more quickly to changing user requirements. With the advent of a more mobile workforce and increased inter-university collaboration, a growing number of academic and commercial institutions are beginning to offer document storage and collaboration as a hosted service as well. Like Northeastern, recent Xythos customers have cited Xythos’ ability to improve content security by making it easy for users to access content over the web while improving the organization’s ability to protect and track it. As a result, secure web-based content storage helps provide a foundation for delivering other applications within a service oriented architecture.
About Xythos Software
Xythos Software is a leading developer of easy-to-use solutions for managing and sharing content of any type using open standards-based technology. Xythos’ web-enabled document and content management applications and its WebFile Server development platform helps organizations safely capture, manage, store and share content throughout its lifecycle. Xythos products are licensed to over two million users at commercial, education and government organizations around the world. To learn more about Xythos, visit www.xythos.com or call 1-888-4XYTHOS.
About Northeastern
Northeastern University, located in the heart of Boston, Massachusetts, is a world leader in practice-oriented education and recognized for its expert faculty and first-rate academic and research facilities. Northeastern integrates challenging liberal arts and professional studies with the nation’s largest cooperative education program. Through co-op, Northeastern undergraduates alternate semesters of full-time study with semesters of paid work in fields relevant to their professional interests and major, giving them nearly two years of professional experience upon graduation. The majority of Northeastern graduates receive a job offer from a co-op employer. Cited for excellence three years running by U.S. News & World Report, Northeastern has quickly moved up into the top tier rankings—an impressive 30 spots in three years. In addition, Northeastern was named a top college in the northeast by the Princeton Review 2003/04. For more information, please visit http://www.northeastern.edu.
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- Marti Colwell, Creative Marketing Group
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