Month: September 2014

Update on the university Microsoft Office 365 initiative

ITS is now in the design phase of the Microsoft Office 365 initiative. In the research phase, we received significant positive feedback with some questions and concerns from our UConn IT community.  Using this information, we produced a tentative design that was reviewed by the ITS IT Technical Partners governance body.  The architecture is now at a point where we have begun preliminary planning for an implementation.

ITS is searching for volunteers to test Office 365 and provide us with feedback about their experience.  Testers will be given a temporary account and the opportunity to get an early look at the service.  If you would like to participate, send us a message at 365@uconn.edu with your name, netID, contact information, and position within the University.  Information about the service and the project is available at http://office365.uconn.edu.

We appreciate your patience and support as ITS continues to make progress on improving services for our faculty and staff.

Updated and upgraded VPN service

ITS will deploy an updated and upgraded Virtual Private Network (VPN) service on September 15th.

VPN services have been utilized historically to provide authenticated access to the university network from remote locations and thereby allow customers to safely and securely utilize certain restricted services from outside the university. Juniper has stopped providing support for the existing hardware, and this has produced numerous problems for our community when they use the old access client. The new infrastructure will be current, fully supported, and consistent with contemporary approaches and re-architected to double its network bandwidth. Web access will be available, but there are also clients for iOS, Android OS, Windows, and OS X. We are deploying the infrastructure in a high availability configuration at two disparate locations to provide a more robust experience than the current implementation.

Additional information is available at the following location: http://remoteaccess.uconn.edu