Xythos Software announced that more than a half dozen new colleges and universities have joined its customer ranks. Included among these new institutions are Pepperdine University, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Cleveland State University, Meredith College and École Polytechnique Fédérale De Lausanne. With the addition of these institutions, Xythos now counts more than one million licensed users in the academic and research marketplace.

The selection of Xythos products as part of an enterprise-wide solution to address administrative document management requirements was critical to Pepperdine University and the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. At Pepperdine, where Don Thompson is the Associate Vice President for Planning, Information and Technology, Xythos Enterprise Document Manager 5.0 will facilitate the university’s accreditation process, providing a much-needed centralized digital repository for storing and managing all documents associated with the Western Association of Schools and Colleges’ accreditation process. Thompson also anticipates that he will be able to automate the faculty evaluation process (for rank, tenure and promotion) using Xythos. “We did not have a centralized management system for critical documents, including a lot of our intellectual property, and that is a significant business process improvement that we needed to make. We selected Xythos because it provides a robust solution to capture all of our procedural information and is already designed to meet the university’s security requirements. In addition, the system is one that I do not have to constantly manage because it is web-based and easy enough for everyone to use,” Thompson remarked.

The Xythos Enterprise Document Manager 5.0 has also been selected by the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM) to help meet it’s goals as a major research university and address the diverse needs of Wisconsin's largest metropolitan area by supporting key initiatives including the expansion and growth of research. UWM is developing strategic partnerships and collaborations with the public, nonprofit and private sectors and is supporting partnerships across the university. According to Interim Chief Information Officer Bruce Maas, Xythos is a key part of the infrastructure necessary to support faculty needs associated with collaborative research activities. “Our goal is to use Xythos as a storage platform from which we can create a base level of infrastructure for all researchers at UWM to store, access and share documents and files from anywhere,” stated Maas. “We need to be in a position where we can nimbly respond to both anticipated and unanticipated document storage needs as they develop. We expect our documents will be better organized, more secure and accessible throughout the enterprise as a result of deploying Xythos,” he observed.

Xythos’ adherence to open standards-based technology has also driven it to the forefront of web services initiatives at several major universities. Built-in support for J2EE, WebDAV and LDAP have helped schools such as Northeastern University and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst develop plans to integrate document management and collaboration within their enterprise portal environments so that they can begin to deliver applications and content wherever faculty and students happen to be. Northeastern University’s Northeastern On Demand initiative and the University of Massachusetts Amherst Digital Learning Commons each represent bold examples of how academic institutions can leverage the web to better facilitate the collaborative learning process while reducing the complexity and cost of supporting highly mobile and diverse user communities.

At the University of Massachusetts Amherst, David Powicki, Associate Director of Network Services and Richard Rogers, Faculty Advisor to the Provost for Undergraduate Education have collaborated to build the university’s first Digital Learning Commons. Staffed by librarians, library staff, IT staff and student assistants, it offers 15 group rooms, three electronic classrooms, more than 250 workstations and workspaces and more than 400 ports for network access. Developed to encourage faculty and student collaboration, the Digital Learning Commons is intended to leverage web-based services to improve the integration of information and instructional technologies. “This is where Web technology starts to pay nice dividends,” explained Rogers. “With Xythos we now have a safer, richer and more efficient alternative to email for storing and sharing files – and our faculty, students and staff are becoming more and more comfortable using a web-based system.”

At Northeastern University Bob Weir, Vice President of Information Services and Rick Mckool, Executive Director for Information Services are providing a web-based virtual computing environment for faculty, students and staff named “Northeastern On Demand”. Access to services is provided through the university’s myNEU portal which provides role-based authentication and access to a combination of web-enabled application, collaboration and file storage services. The Xythos WebFile Server provides a ‘virtual C drive within the portal’ that offers secure storage and sharing features for all of the files that are accessed and created within the Northeastern On Demand environment. “The real issue today is the lack of mobility and access. People should be able to have tools they can use, access to their work information any time, any where and, increasingly, on any device. We are leveraging the web with tools like Xythos and our portal to meet the needs of our mobile, distributed user community,” Weir remarked.

While Xythos continues to experience rapid adoption of its Digital Locker application in the education market, the more advanced uses of its technology are beginning to gain notice. Already, the Northeast On Demand project has received three industry awards from publications including Campus Technology, CIO Magazine, and Computerworld. “As academic institutions continue to seek new ways to improve the learning process and simplify the delivery of their services its only natural that they look to web technology to help,” observed, Ed Miller, CEO of Xythos. “We’ve designed Xythos applications and our WebFile Server platform to be an integral part of both academic and administrative systems and we’re encouraged to see how such respected institutions are taking advantage of our work,” he added.