Rene Schutte
Assistant Director: Student & Client Support, WITS University

René is a techie/nerd/geek/developer/ex-hacker at heart and always will be. Nowadays she remains responsible for managing the student and client desktop environment for Wits University, Johannesburg, South Africa. She still misses her core techie role, but does find the management of the Service Desks, SOE (Standard Operating Environment) and client liaison role challenging it its own way.

Having completed a Hons. degree in Information Systems at the Univeristy of Johannesburg along with a horde of subsequent specialist IT courses she witnessed the birth of WWW, was addicted to MUSHes, and MUDS (like DikuMUD and CircleMUD) and co-owner of The WebHosting Company.

She later moved to an insurance firm called Charter Life as a consultant, and helped manage the back-end environment for the company, inclusive of email, firewall, Delphi programming, Oracle cluster on Linux (Redhat) and Solaris. She was instrumental in compiling a workable DR (BCP) plan for the company as well as apply her graphic design skills (mainly Paintshop and Photoshop) for the company Internet and Intranet.

Her current interests include reacquainting herself with Linux, specifically Unbuntu (Jaunty) inline with formalizing the FOSS strategy of the University. She is especially interested in finding enterprise-ready integrated email/calendering/contacts solutions such as Zimbra to provide a truly platform-independant solution at Wits.

.. oh, and she’s very excited about going to Oscon ;->