Jeff Dillon

Ten years ago, Google told higher education to go find a new search engine. It is doing it again. In February 2016, Google announced it was discontinuing the Google Search Appliance. No new hardware sales after 2016, support winding down through 2018, and complete discontinuation by 2019. Hundreds of institutions that had built campus search around a rack-mounted box in a data center got about two years to figure out what came next. Google offered no migration path and no replacement product....

In July, security researchers found a serious bug in WordPress. People are calling it WP2Shell. Josh Koenig, co-founder of the WebOps hosting company Pantheon, said it best in a recent interview with EdTech Connect: "This is the most serious WordPress security update ever." He's not exaggerating. On most WordPress sites, this bug lets an attacker take over the whole site without even logging in. No password needed. That's about as bad as a bug can get, and it was sitting inside WordPress...

Not long ago, an R1 research university was on the verge of receiving a $50 million gift. Transformational money. The kind that gets announced at a board meeting and celebrated with a press release. The donor had one condition: naming rights for the college of business. The development office was thrilled. The IT team was not. What followed was not a legal negotiation or a donor relations problem. It was an infrastructure crisis. The university operated dozens of independent CMS instances...