Software evaluations should be conducted within the guidelines offered by the manufacturer, and not through personally owned software. In addition to the above guidelines, the user community should also be aware of the following University policies for acceptable use of computing resources at the University of Georgia. When a group in the Dean's Office needs increased function from its software environment please contact a member of the Systems Group to discuss this. The object of this dialog is to assist you in finding a way to do what is needed through software tools already available to this office, or to suggest packages that can be supported. It is not a rational model for an administrative office to expand its software tools set unnessecarily.
Software tools have a substantial support overhead in terms of upgrade and training.
New tools should only be added if there is not a reasonable way to use existing tools. This kind of discussion also provides the best opportunity for finding a solution that meets the interoperability constraints in the networked environment. All software products, be they networking software or networked applications, have some effect on the mix of traffic on the network. These effects can be calculated to some extent, but in order to do this with successfully requires training and experience in network capacity planning. Additions to the networked application software set on the administrative network must be evaluated by the Systems Group before going into production, as behavior on the network effects all users.