California Educational Data Processing Association
	The DataBus - Vol. 36, No. 4 June-July, 1996

May SIG Summary

Eric Boutwell, San Francisco Unified School District

Java was the overall theme at the May SIG meeting. Sun Microsystems hosted CEDPA members at their Palo Alto facility. Sun started with a one hour Java overview and where Sun and the industry are heading.

All attendees were requested to sign a non-disclosure agreement so I can't report all that we learned. I can say however that Java is going to be big in education. Java is going to be all over the Internet and on K-12 Intranets. When you realize that every major computer operating system company is building Java technology into their operating systems you know this is not going to go away. We in the K-12 area who are designing networks need to know more about this technology and how it is going to drive us to provide higher bandwidth lines to all our schools. Java is hot and getting hotter.

After the Java discussion and demo we went to what I believe is the most interesting part of our SIG meetings--the general discussion where each attendee can ask about and have discussed any topic that is of interest to them.

The main topics discussed in May were:

1. Firewalls and security--who is doing what?
2. How do you cost justify the high cost of building and maintaining high bandwidth Intranets?
3. Intranet--who is doing what?
4. What are people doing about the turn of the century problem?
5. Setting up phone switch systems.
6. What software applications help in setting up and managing Intranets and Internet systems?
7. How to handle the setting up of teacher and student E-mail accounts?

Sun then shared their view on data warehousing and distance learning using digital video. Digital video didn't seam like it was quite up to prime time in the K-12 environment but it's coming.

A big thank you to SUN Microsystems for hosting this CEDPA SIG meeting. See you at the next SIG meeting or at the CEDPA conference in October.

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