Policies

Montana State University-Northern recognizes the need for its faculty, staff, and students to have the necessary tools to perform their jobs well. With this need in mind, we make every effort to install and maintain modern and effective technology resources. Our intention is to make these systems easy and readily available; at the same time, we need to ensure correct and efficient use. To prevent abuse, guidelines have been established for the use of MSU-N technology. These policies and standards are in place to provide the university community with the services they need, while safeguarding valuable resources.

The spirit of all IT policies and standards is based on common sense. If you do have questions, contact the Help Desk at 265-3765.

Standards

MSU-Northern recognizes the wisdom of standardizing technology for the most efficient and effective use of resources, including human, material and budgetary. To this end, ITS has established standards for many technology tools and resources. If you have a good relationship with a vendor, then they are more apt to go out of their way to assist you with critical issues and when you need products expedited.

Buying or purchasing from one manufacturer usually means that the sales and service representatives become familiar with our business needs. If you use one vendor, then typically the vendor is familiar with our business and requirements, products, and our standards.

By using Gateway Systems as our standards, we use a vendor that offer several products, we gain a lot of advantage from dealing mostly with this one supplier for our computer systems, especially since they can cover the range from laptop to high-performance servers. We are able to negotiate a contract that covers all the equipment wherever it is used on or off campus.

Standardization has eased support and funding challenges as our support team doesn't have to troubleshoot multiple systems. ITS and the Help Desk support team do have to provide the first line of defense, and using one standard makes it less complicated and time-consuming. Warranty replacement of faulty components is also much faster and less expensive.

By standardizing equipment it's easy to upgrade, users are less likely to notice any change when the upgrades occur. This can save time and money with training new users.

Finally, standardization also makes it easier to track software licenses. If we have a question on any issue surrounding those licenses, we can always go back to the vendor and get that information.

ITS has seen real differences in cost in the following areas:

• Single user or department pricing vs. campus-level pricing (both for HW and SW)
• Help Desk hours providing support for standardized SW and equipment vs. individual support
• License tracking, purchasing (administrative costs) have been reduced
• Vendor support has dramatically increased, giving us much more rapid response to problems and parts requests, as well as better pricing
• Curbing acquisition and ongoing costs of desktop computing
• Easing generic computing support burden; focuses on higher-value support
• Improving sharing of electronic documents
• Fostering collaboration among students and faculty
• Facilitating development of instructional materials
• Standardizing replacement cycles
• Stabilizing annual budget processes
• Reducing use of out-of-date computers
• Providing competitive pricing for hardware and services
• Improving the reliability and stability of our network systems

The standardization program is intended to meet the basic word processing, data presentation, and communications needs of about 80 percent of the University's faculty and staff, and nearly all of its students. When the unique computing needs of some users are not addressed by standardization, other arrangements can be made.

Software Titles, Installation Status and ITS Support levels
Minimum Workstation Configurations
Supported Hardware & Replacement Cycle FAQ

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