UCI Student Life & Leadership Information Technology

History

The Beginning

During the 1997-1998 academic year, registered campus organizations (RCOs) were expressing growing discontent with the free commercial email web services available at the time. These services tended to have poor performance, long addresses, small capacity limits, and no affiliation with the UCI campus. In the summer of 1998, a multi-department collaboration tried to address the issue...

  • The Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs agreed to purchase the server and hardware needed
  • ASUCI agreed to fund a student position to manage accounts and provide techincial support
  • The Office of the Dean of Students agreed to host and manage the server and supervise the student position
  • Network and Academic Computing Services agreed to create @uci.edu aliases for the server's email accounts

For the first time ever, campus organizations had UCI email addresses and websites on the clubs.uci.edu domain. The Apple PowerMac G3/300 server also offered Mailman mail list service, PHP scripting, and MySQL database service.

Evolution

Over the years, the campus population grew, and so too did the number of organizations and their technical demands. Instead of POP3 email service, we migrated users to IMAP4 so they no longer had to download messages to local devices. We started offering WordPress installations for groups who did not want to manually create HTML/CSS files, and we offered full stack resources for groups wanting to code their own web applications. We also offered volunteer opportunities for students interested in server administration, technical support expierence, or application coding. When Google came to campus for student email, we soon made arrangements for student groups to get Google accounts to relieve our server from the burden of IMAP services and expand services to include the entire G suite of services, not just email.

Modern Era

As the campus underwent an IT consolidation, an agreement was made to shut down the server in favor of campuswide cloud-based services instead. Although we could no longer offer full stack websites to our tech groups, CampusGroups offered student groups a vast array of other membership, commmunication, and event sign-up tools which appealed to almost every group instead. When Google accounts switched to SSO (single sign-on) authentication, groups were given access to the Google account's sponsoring GroupUCInetID, which previously had only been available to departments. Consequently, student groups were suddenly given access to services previously unavailable to their organizations, e.g. sites.uci.edu websites, UCI Zoom accounts, etc.

Today, RCOs continue to leverage these electronic services everyday in just about everything they do.