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Getting IT Done at the IT Open House

The IT Open House offered attendees the opportunity to engage with IT providers, participate in a virtual reality experience, and win valuable prizes.
Friday, April 21, 2017

On April 13, students, faculty, and staff visited the IT Open House to meet with representatives from various providers of Stanford IT services.

Attendees had the opportunity to learn about services offered by companies such as AT&T, Amazon Web Services, Sprint, HP, and VMware. Six of the seven Stanford schools were represented, in addition to the Vice Provost for Teaching and Learning, Vice Provost for Student Affairs, and Stanford Video.  A wide variety of teams from University IT were present as well. A full list of exhibitors is available at https://itopenhouse.stanford.edu/exhibitors.

The Open House gave attendees the opportunity to explore new partnerships, discuss IT solutions, celebrate successes, and reconnect with old friends and colleagues.

Schools and departments displayed their IT solutions and shared information with colleagues. Topics of conversation included monitoring solutions, high-speed research computing, storage, administrative applications, reporting solutions, communications and mobile services, networking, training, and academic computing.

Virtual reality experience

Almost 50 attendees participated in virtual reality demonstrations. In 12-minute increments, guests experimented with HTC Vive Reality Headsets that allowed them to walk around in a pre-defined space in the real world that was mapped in the virtual world. One graduate student from Stanford Earth used the Google Earth VR to travel back to his research site in the New Mexico desert. Another attendee visited her native Ukraine and saw her childhood home and school.

Giveaways and prizes

“After speaking with the representatives behind the booths, I learned about the remarkable efforts being made to better the lives of the university community at large. Our central and distributed IT groups are united in the central mission to serve.”

-Jackie Holland, IT project manager in Humanities & Sciences


Read more about Jackie’s IT Open House experience in her article,  The Stanford IT Community: Practitioners of Service and Technological Leadership.

Various booths had fun giveaways such as Amazon gift cards, sustainable wooden cutlery, candy, popcorn, Easter eggs, stuffed animals, wildflower seed packets, and IT themed prize bags. And, as always, amazing raffle prizes were awarded to those in attendance. The lucky winners went home with a Kindle, Audio Tech Headphones, an Apple TV, an Echo Tap, or a Fitbit.

Learn more

To learn more about this annual event, visit the IT Open House web site. You can also see photos and comments about the event on Twitter using the hashtag #suitoh17.

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