<h1>Scenarios - Faculty View</h1>

Prof. A has been waiting for a very long time to be able to assign homework
and project assignments using Aspen, a professional Chem Eng software
package. The problem up until now has been that this software runs only on
Windows machines, and general student computing access has been limited to
UNIX workstations in Public and Departmental clusters. The Windows machines
in the Chem Eng departmental cluster are often being corrupted, and the
departmental cluster manager doesn't have the time to do the local
administration of these machines in a timely and reliable manner. There are
also only 6 Windows machine in the departmental cluster, nowhere near
enough for bringing in a full recitation section for a hands-on session.<p>
Now that Pismere is operational, he is able to reserve an electronic
classroom in 2-032 for three hours, so that he can bring the three
recitation sections of 10.999 in for a hands-on tutorial to this software.
Once the students have come up to speed on how to use the software, he will
be reserving large blocks of "project" time in this room for students to
come and complete their assignments.<p>
He had earlier gone to the Academic Computing Support team for help with
getting the Aspen software into an AFS locker. They have explained to him
that Windows 2000 "courseware" can be delivered in a manner similar to
Athena UNIX software that resides in such lockers. Since Aspen has license
restriction on it, there will be "ACL's"on the software so that only
students enrolled in his course and Chem Eng grad students can access it.
However, the Aspen software is not yet Windows 2000 Logo compliant so the
department and IS had to work together to develop an MSI installer and some
Active Directory entries to manage and install the software correctly.
At the same time, the Windows machines in the departmental cluster will be
Pismerized so that they can be managed more centrally, and the onerous
tasks of maintaining separate accounts and reconfiguring individual
workstations when one becomes corrupted will be lifted from the shoulders
of the cluster manager.<p>
He knows that he will be paying on a per machine basis to have the cluster
machines Pismerized, but it is worth it to him, because now when there is a
problem he can called Pismere Cluster Services to come out and do some
triage. If it turns out that the software on the machine has become
corrupted, they will reload it over the net, and if it's a hardware problem
he'll be entitled to have the faulty component replaced because of the
hardware maintenance part of the Pismere fee.
