Ryan Elstad is a systems administrator at the Whitman Management School at Syracuse University. He has eight years of experience in information technology in higher ed. In his current position, Elstad is responsible for helping design, deploy and manage the IT infrastructure with a focus on customer service, servers and operating systems at the Whitman School, which specializes in leadership at the intersection of business and technology. He has also written a review of unified threat management devices that appeared in the September/October issue of EdTech: Focus on Higher Education.

Jeffrey Fritz serves as director, enterprise network services (ENS), for the University of California, San Francisco. He is responsible for directing campuswide network technology development and deployment for UCSF. ENS provides voice and data connectivity to the two main campuses in San Francisco, two hospitals and more than 200 remote sites.

Fritz has a master’s degree in electrical engineering from West Virginia University. His experience in higher education IT spans nearly 20 years. He has served as both director and principal network engineer for West Virginia University. He is the co-founder and chair emeritus of the North American ISDN Users’ Forum Enterprise Network Data Interconnectivity Family (ENDIF). He is also the past chair of the National Information Infrastructure Working Group. NIIWG paved the way for today’s Internet2.

Fritz is the author of Remote LAN Access: A Guide for Networkers and the Rest of Us, published by Prentice-Hall PTR, and Sensible ISDN Data Applications, now in its third printing, published by Vandalia Press. He has been an instructor for the American Institute.

Howard Marks is chief scientist of Networks Are Our Lives, a Hoboken, N.J., networking consultancy he founded in 1981, as well as an IT network architect at SUNY-Purchase. NAOL’s mission is to “help organizations clean up their network messes,” and it focuses on network design and documentation, storage consolidation and management projects. Marks has spoken at industry conferences and is the author of Networking Windows and co-author of Windows NT Unleashed.