by Brooke Bunch

What started from a mustard-seed-sized nuisance of an unavailable phone number has become an extraordinary information network for OU-COM staff, faculty and students. And the best part may be that it’s still growing.

The information network, “InfoCOM,” was created as part of a recent Web innovation by the Office of Information Systems & Instructional Technology. The project, began February 2004, was officially launched in late August after many meetings with personnel from just about every part of the college. The InfoCOM “mark” was designed by Kari Gunter-Seymour, communication designer. 

Brian Phillips, chief information officer, says InfoCOM can be described as a one-stop shopping Web site, with links to personnel policies, phone lists, addresses and even meeting minutes of the Ohio University Senate and the OU-COM Communications Group.

“It’s a resource that provides information on the college and on the CORE,” Phillips says. The tech shop now ships new computers with a desktop shortcut to the site, making it a standard of sorts.

One highlight: there is a series of departmental organizational charts that display the personnel of the department and the department’s hierarchy. And the charts have a really nice pan-and-zoom feature built into them. Neat stuff!

It all began when Phillips was unable to locate a faculty phone number while attending a conference. The absence of an efficient online resource pushed Phillips and college staff to develop InfoCOM.

Through InfoCOM — located at www.oucom.ohiou.edu/infocom/ — one can access employee information, departmental calendars, administrative links, online forms, publications and training materials, and more. There are “how-to-guides” on several subjects, including, for the technologically challenged, “how to” scan and “how to” e-mail. And there are more of these guides to come.

Phillips says the site is an excellent resource for faculty and staff as well as students or anyone interested in the college. The site is available to anyone surfing the Web, but all of the site’s contents are not. Some parts of the site do require username-password authentication.

And the site can change as needs change, says Eric McFadden, technical services specialist and one of the site’s builders. “Nancy Savage needed more detailed listings in the CORE phone directory, so she and I worked together to add it. Now she can direct people needing CORE telephone numbers to InfoCOM instead of just sending them an email containing CORE phone numbers,” says McFadden.

“I think it’s really cool,” says Shelby Mullins, communication editorial associate. “It’s a really good resource for employees, particularly for policies. It used to be nearly impossible to find them when you needed to quickly reference them.”

“Everybody that’s found it says it is a great thing; and it was long overdue,” Phillips says. “We’ve gotten great feedback so far.”

If you have feedback or a suggestion for something to be added to the site, please contact Jill Breeze at (740) 593-2524 or email her at breeze@ohio.edu — so check out InfoCOM today!