ITS has re-designed the IT Status page.

The purpose of the IT Status page is to communicate the condition of systems and services to our UConn community.  Continue reading →

On the evening of Friday, February 13^th, ITS discovered that the myUConn app class schedule module was malfunctioning on Android devices.  Research into the problem revealed that an update to the Android operating Continue reading →

ITS is responsible for a broad collection of systems, services, and capabilities that in many different ways, are important to our community.  Disruptions will periodically occur as we work to maintain and evolve our infrastructure.  ITS has a Change Advisory Board (CAB) that consists of our managers and is tasked with ensuring that substantive changes to IT systems and services follow a standardized process and proceed in a transparent, orderly fashion.  This minimizes the risk of outages or other negative impacts to the community.  A key step in this process involves communicating effectively and broadly with audiences internal and external to ITS.  This crucial step increases awareness among the community of upcoming changes and prompts timely feedback.  To achieve our communication goals, ITS is now publishing scheduled changes on the University events calendar under “change advisory board“.  This new change calendar gives CAB a mechanism to effectively reach a wider audience and gives constituents more opportunity to surface concerns or to illuminate impacts that may have been overlooked.  It also leverages the built-in features of the university events system, such as providing you with the capability to add the CAB calendar to Outlook and subscribe to RSS feeds.  ITS is committed to effective collaboration; we believe that our dedicated change calendar will make it easier for us to deliver information and for you to obtain it conveniently via a mechanism of your choice.

ITS will have a moratorium on non-emergency network and system changes starting Monday, December 8, through Thursday, December 18.

We understand that this time of year is a critical period with students and faculty trying to meet end of semester obligations. ITS will defer changes to systems and services that might have a production impact in order to minimize potential outages during this high-anxiety period. Changes required to respond to emergent situations will be duly evaluated and pursued only if their need is significant.

Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have comments, questions, or concerns.

ITS has completed a design for the university Microsoft Office 365 initiative and would like to ask for any final feedback.

Microsoft Office 365 is an organized collection of cloud-based business productivity technologies that integrates enhanced communication and collaboration tools.  It is well aligned towards individuals and their ability to personally leverage technology.  Adoption of this architecture represents a departure from the traditional way IT is centrally delivered at the University.  For this reason, ITS has pursued this project methodically and requested feedback throughout the process to ensure that the end product would be robust and also effectively meet the diverse needs of our constituents.  We have now completed a design, which is the outcome of a rigorous internal and external vetting process. You can review the design documentation on our Microsoft Office 365 website: http://office365.uconn.edu/.  As we begin implementation planning, we ask that you send any final feedback to Josh Boggs at josh.boggis@uconn.edu.  Once we complete the implementation and transition project plan, we will no longer be seeking input on the design.

The ITS Help Center, located in the Math-Science Building M037 and on the first floor (Homer Commons) of the Homer Babbidge Library, provides first contact support and assistance to the university community for the wide variety of services provided by the organization. Our services and their associated support have historically had community centric differences based on major group affiliation (i.e., faculty, staff or student). Unfortunately, this resulted in varied customer experiences and confusion depending on how individuals approached the organization. Based on feedback from faculty, staff, and students, ITS restructured our Help Center at the beginning of the semester to include a mix of HuskyTech student employees and full-time staff. This was done so that all members of our community, regardless of affiliation, would have consistent support options and, more importantly, a high-quality customer experience. These changes have allowed ITS to pursue process and resource efficiency goals while better meeting the individual needs and expectations of our customers.

The past months have validated the preliminary changes, and with your assistance, we are committed to continued development of the Help Center. Your support and feedback remains key to its successful evolution, and we welcome any insights or observations you might share. Please contact Pat Meinweiser with comments, questions, or concerns.

ITS has implemented selected redesigns of the Student Administration (SA) System to address structural problems that resulted in service disruptions during the registration process.

The SA system is a hub for student information and activity and is widely used by faculty, students, staff, and alumni. They experienced numerous problems with login, authorization, kick-outs, and browser incompatibility.  These service issues were caused by firewall performance, browser connection, and application software issues.  ITS engineered network changes to increase reliability and performance and deployed a new load balancing infrastructure to improve the interaction between client browsers and the SA application.  These fixes were implemented at the beginning of October, and the peak registration cycle has now concluded without the raft of service calls that occurred at the beginning of the semester.  ITS will continue to assess the infrastructure and to make selected changes and upgrades to improve the experience of our community

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.

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

ITS will have a three-week moratorium on non-emergency network and system changes starting Monday, August 18, through Sunday, September 7.

We understand that the start of the fall semester is a critical period for students and faculty as they acclimate to the new school year.  ITS will defer changes to systems and services that might have a production impact in order to minimize potential outages during this high-anxiety period.  Changes required to respond to emergent situations will be duly evaluated and pursued only if their need is significant.