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System allows Web storage for students, faculty
Official launch set for early next year
By Kayla Bunge
Students, faculty and staff at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee now have a way to store files on the Web and access them anywhere on or off campus.
The campus file storage system is called PantherFile. With PantherFile, students have 250 megabytes of storage available and faculty and staff have one gigabyte. Students employed by the university also have one gigabyte of storage.
“The driver (behind PantherFile) was to provide anywhere, anytime access to documents in an easy-to-use, secure fashion for all of our faculty, our staff and our students,” said Bruce Maas, interim chief information officer for Information & Media Technologies (I&MT).
Because PantherFile provides Web-based access to files, it is ideal for students using campus computer labs.
“This is a way, for example, for students using our labs to be able to store their files,” said Maas. “Then when they’re home, the same files are accessible to them.”
PantherFile also enables users to share files. Users can choose the sharing options for each file or directory that is stored, including who they share their files with and how those files are shared.
Also, users can allow a file to be read and downloaded, or they can grant other users the permission to edit a file.
According to Maas, this is a great solution to the file-sharing problems encountered by students working on group projects and faculty and staff doing collaborative research.
PantherFile also provides users an easier way to send files via e-mail. Instead of attaching a document to an e-mail, users can upload the file to PantherFile and place a hyperlink to the file within the e-mail. This method relieves the stress placed on campus e-mail servers.
“Ultimately, it will result in our ability to be more efficient in the use of our resources,” Maas said. “And it will create additional functionality and ways of collaborating for our students, our faculty, and our staff.”
The software for PantherFile was purchased by the university in early 2004 with monies allocated to I&MT that was not spent during the fiscal year. The software’s purveyor, Xythos, is used by most of the Big Ten institutions, Mass said, and UWM worked closely with the University of Wisconsin, which purchased the software a year earlier.
I&MT launched a pilot of PantherFile in June 2005 with 100 faculty, staff and students. PantherFile went live to campus in September 2005 in what is called a soft launch. A soft launch means the software was made available to everyone, but only word-of-mouth advertising was used.
“A soft launch allows you to discover whether or not you have any final little issues with things,” Maas said. “It’s a way of shaking it down before we go out and actively promote to all of roughly 32,000 users on campus.”
So far, 700 people have “self-discovered” PantherFile, Maas said, and everyday more people are using the storage system. He also said that I&MT is receiving quite a bit of positive feedback about PantherFile.
The formal marketing and launch of PantherFile will occur in January and February 2006. Maas is optimistic about PantherFile use by the campus community.
“What I’m hoping is that all students and all faculty and staff will start to use PantherFile for storing their documents,” he said.
To access PantherFile, users simply enter their ePanther ID and password at https://pantherfile.uwm.edu.
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