IT at the department

Event though the software presented here is not provided by us, but by the WWU IT and the IVV NWZ (IVV 4), we’d still like to inform you about what’s available.

Through the WWU IT, students can obtain software for free. Among that is current (professional) anti-virus software and application software:

• Microsoft Office 365
• Sophos Anti-Virus
• SPSS (requires VPN connection)
• Mathematica (requires VPN connection)
• Maple
• MATLAB

The IVV NWZ also offers a very extensive range of software, which can be used fully in the ComputerLabs, to a large extent through the Remote Desktop/Terminal Server (with VPN connection) and partly also on the own computer.

Moreover, you can access the offers available with Microsoft Azure Dev Tools for Teaching (formerly MS Imagine, MS DreamSpark, MSDN AA) through the IVV NWZ. With that, you receive the remaining part of almost all of Microsoft’s software (except for Office) free of charge.

Campus cloud sciebo

The campus cloud sciebo (“science box”) is a joint project of many universities in NRW. The University of Münster is a leading participant (as one of three server sites). We really like the project and actively use it ourselves. Sciebo even had its beginnings through a member of the Physics Student Council!

Sciebo is a cloud storage service (similar to e. g. Dropbox) which is run by different universities in NRW. As a student at the University of Münster, you can use it free of charge with a storage volume of 30 GB. Substantial advantages over commercial cloud providers are for example:

• Other than (often US-based) commercial services which generate revenue from analyzing and sharing user data, the sciebo operators, as universities in NRW, are bound to substantial data privacy regulations and data processing occurs exclusively in Germany.
• Sciebo is non-commercial and thus has no interest in sharing user data to begin with.
• Sciebo utilizes the open source system ownCloud.