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.

Update, 1/20/2015: project delayed due to contract negotiations

ITS has procured the installation of dedicated fiber connections from the Torrington and Avery Point regional campuses to the Connecticut Education Network (CEN), a university and state-run regional network provider.  These connections, similar to the kind recently installed to support the extension centers in Tolland and Norwich, will permit 1Gbs connectivity between the UConn Storrs campus, Torrington campus, Avery Point campus, some additional extension offices, and the Litchfield County Extension Center.  Existing connectivity to the Torrington and Avery Point campuses is currently limited to 10Mbps, which is inadequate to meet either the current and projected campus needs of researchers, teachers, learners, staff, and guests.  The greatly enhanced connections are scheduled to be live during UConn’s Winter Recess.

ITS has launched an initiative to explore a Microsoft Office 365 service offering for the University of Connecticut.

Microsoft Office 365 has the potential to enhance individual productivity and facilitate collaboration. It would provide significantly larger mailboxes, Office sharing and interaction tools, text and video chat, one terabyte of personal cloud storage, and other useful features.  We are currently in the research phase of the project and will reach out to request your feedback throughout the process.  Your insight and perspective will be critical to the successful development of an efficient design that maximizes the service potential for our community and an effective implementation plan that minimizes disruption during transition.

ITS and the Law School have combined our mail and calendar environments.

The university Exchange environment was intended to facilitate interaction and collaboration across our community.  Design choices and competing systems have historically made this difficult.  Over the past year, ITS has evolved the central service based on direct feedback from our IT partners.  For example, ITS and UConn Health unified our address books to simplify cross-organization scheduling.  This change was designed to increase usefulness and to encourage broader institutional adoption of the central service.  Migrating the Law School email and calendar system to our central environment benefits both the Law School and the University.  ITS will continue to improve our email and calendar service and will work with units to integrate capabilities or even combine systems.

ITS Mobile Solutions has hired a Graduate Assistant (GA) to support development of research-related mobile applications for faculty, a change that extends service to researchers and aligns with the academic mission of the University.

Faculty have been requesting support for mobile app development and while the demand has grown, it has remained inadequate to generate sufficient revenue to offset the expense of a dedicated position. We recognized that research teams need this support now and that the institution would be best served by creating a position. ITS will recover a portion of the operating expense from clients through hourly billing, and we will subsidize the remaining shortfall. For more information and to submit a development request, visit http://mobile.uconn.edu.