Fall '26 Week 12
Resources
Video Script
[00:00] Hello and welcome to the week 12 announcements video for CIS 527 and CC 510 in fall 2026. So this week you should be working on lab six. The quizzes for that are due Friday. We’ll have our fifth and final discussion session with the guest speaker next Wednesday. And then lab six will be due next Friday. So you’ll want to make sure you get that scheduled for grading before Thanksgiving. However, if you do notice that the week after that is Thanksgiving break. So if you wait all the way until the Monday after Thanksgiving break, there will just be a one day late penalty on lab six grading. So just keep that in mind. But lab six is due indeed a week from Friday. So lab six, we’re going to do a few things. We’re going to do file servers and drive mappings on both Windows and Linux. We’re also going to do some application server stuff on Windows and your Linux in the Cloud, and we’ll do some stuff working with web apps there as well. This one we’re going to jump around between different setups of the labs, but hopefully everything works out well for this. For those of you using Azure, you’ll be using your Windows servers in Azure a little bit for this for the file servers, drive mappings, and web apps. Once you get Lab 6 graded, that’s all we’re going to do with Windows server, so you can decommission those Azure things as soon as you get them graded on Lab 6. So if you’re concerned with that, you can work through Lab 6 pretty quickly and get that graded soon. The DigitalOcean stuff we’ll use through Lab 6 and Lab 7. So like I said, for lab seven, we’re going to have some stuff on backups. We’re going to do a little bit on monitoring and logging, and we’ll do an activity on DevOps dealing with some webhooks. So be prepared for that as well.
[01:34] Other big thing to keep in mind is for lab seven, there’s no grading meeting required. You’re just going to upload things onto Canvas for that. So you can turn in lab seven anytime as you get it done. You can also email me ahead of time if you want to be graded before the end of the semester and I would be happy to grade those things and confirm that they’re done just so you know that you’re good and you can decommission your digital ocean stuff after lab 7. Last big thing in this class, I hinted to a lot of people over the last couple weeks that you need to be thinking about your final project.
[02:00] So the idea behind this final project is mostly a thought exercise where you’re going to propose some sort of an IT project. It could be building something new or fixing something that needs fixing, designing a web resource for a startup company, setting up laptops for a school, central authentication for a distributed company, discussing things like thin clients versus thick clients in computer labs or on desks. Tons and tons of things you can do for this. Pretty much any IT project would be a valid idea. If you’re not sure, chat with me anytime. If you want me to kind of think about some ideas or pitch some ideas to you, I’d be happy to do that.
[02:41] What you’re going to do for your final project is you’re going to do three things. First thing you’re going to do is write a written report. There is just any standard research paper template that you can use. You’re going to research your idea, write a clear proposal for your idea, and then perform a SWOT analysis for your idea. A SWOT analysis is strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. You should obviously have multiple bullet points in each one of those headings talking about your idea to basically convince me that you have thought it through, proposed it, and analyzed it fully. You can include graphics, data, resources, whatever you need as needed. So the first big thing you’re going to turn in is your written report. The second thing you’re going to do is a 15-minute presentation, basically talking through your written report. Probably a good idea to make slides and things for that. The goal is, I am your CIO. I am your tech lead. You need to convince me that you’ve analyzed this project well and give me a recommendation on go or no go for this project. By the way, it’s totally okay to propose this project, analyze it, and then realize it’s a bad idea. That’s okay. Negative results are still results, provided you convince me that your analysis follows that format. The other thing I want you to do is make a small prototype of whatever you’re trying to propose. Generally, it just means that you should have something that you can at least get your hands on and play with. For example, I don’t want you to propose an idea of buying an entire data center when you can’t even play around with any of those tools or like specking out different generators for data centers. Those are things that you can’t really play with in person. So I want you to think about some sort of small prototype to go with your project. If you’re talking about putting something in the cloud, maybe you’ll redo parts of one of our labs in AWS instead of DigitalOcean. Or you might download a piece of software and try their trial version of it and see if it works. So the prototype doesn’t have to be much, but it should be something to convince me you’ve actually played around with some part of your larger project. And I expect you to maybe spend about two or four hours total on building out and playing around with your prototype.
[04:33] So last big thing in the presentation, we’re not going to do live presentations. You’re just going to record the video. Zoom is a great way to record video, or if you have any other screen recording tools, I’m using OBS for this, for example. But you’ll make a recorded video, you’ll upload it to either Canvas or OneDrive and share the link in Canvas, and then I will watch your presentations and grade them along with your written report after finals week. So that’s really all that’s going on. The proposal for your final project is due on December 4th, which is the Friday after we get back from Thanksgiving. And then you’ll have a couple of weeks to finish your project and turn it in by the end of finals week, along with Lab 7. So that’s really all we got. Otherwise, if you have questions, you can post it at discussion. You can join office hours anytime. I’d be happy to help. Otherwise, hopefully things are going well in this class. We are nearing the final couple of laps. We’ve got about four weeks to go. So best of luck as you continue on, and let me know if you need anything.