Spotlight News
Student Worker Recognized
Jared Smith is a student worker in the Helpdesk area of Information Technology and has served in that role for over three years. During this time he has received a Most Valuable Professional award from Microsoft for his work in supporting Windows Server products on various online communities. He is a co-author of the 2006 Apress title Building Online Communities with Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress. The book is a three-part, step-by-step introduction to three different pieces of open source software that foster online community and collaboration. Jared contributed six chapters about the installation, rollout, customization, and best practices for administration of the open source phpBB message board software. The other parts of the book, written by co-authors Robert Douglass and Mike Little, explain the installation of Drupal, a popular open-source content management system, and WordPress, an emerging leader in blogging software.
Currently, Jared is pursuing his degree in Communication with the Media Studies emphasis, and hopes to learn the media business so he can further apply his knowledge to participate in the "digital democracy," but he also holds out hope for one day pursuing broadcast journalism. He currently writes about a variety of topics in his own personal blog, monitored by staffers at The Post & Courier’s Charleston.net, as well as contributes knowledge and analysis of all topics Microsoft to MicrosoftBlog.com, an upstart source of news and information about all things Microsoft. Jared recently has tested the new Windows Vista and Office 2007 releases for Microsoft and has applied his knowledge to assist the College’s IT division in formulating a strategy to properly roll out these new technologies to end-users over the next several years.
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