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.
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.
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.