The President’s Cabinet has approved an idle-session policy for College computer users that grants the vice president of information technology the authority to set time-out limits for various systems.

However, Interim Vice President for Information Technology George Middlemist said that he will not set any time-out limits--the amount of time that a system can be open and idle before it automatically shuts down--until input from the College community has been obtained. The main systems that will be affected by time-out limits are Banner, e-mail and MetroConnect.

“IT knows what we’d like the limits to be, but we will have town hall meetings in the next few weeks to get recommendations from faculty and staff about what they think the length of time-outs should be,” he said. “The goal is to bring recommendations to the Cabinet by the end of the semester and have established limits by the start of spring semester.”

The recently approved policy was recommended by the Technology Initiatives Committee, as was the plan to solicit faculty and staff feedback.