EITS Status and Activity Report for March 2014 Prepared by Timothy M.

Chester, Vice President for Information Technology (VPIT) 1. Announcements for Faculty and Staff Meetings MyWeb/MyDrive to be Decommissioned in June 2014. EITS is working with students, faculty, and staff who have used MyWeb/MyDrive regarding the end of the service, effective June 30, 2014. MyDrive is a file storage system that includes MyWeb, which offers personal webpages. Due to budget cuts, the campus-wide licenses that support MyWeb/MyDrive will not be purchased for FY15. As an alternative to MyDrive, Microsofts OneDrive (formerly called SkyDrive) is a free file storage option available to all students, faculty, and staff. EITS is working with individuals and departments who need alternatives to MyWeb. Several third-party products are available. For more information about the decommissioning of MyWeb/MyDrive, please point a browser to http://tinyurl.com/mngjnzj or contact Wes Johnson at wes06@uga.edu by email. New Listserv System to be Available in May. The email list system, called listserv, will be upgraded to a new web interface in May. UGA maintains more than 5,800 listserv groups, including those used beyond the University by other institutions throughout the University System of Georgia. The upgrade will affect listserv owners and/or moderators who use the web interface to post messages and manage their lists. General users and those posting messages to listservs via email will not notice a change. The web interface will have a new design and additional features. EITS is offering a pilot of the new listserv web interface for interested departments through the end of March. To participate in the pilot or for more information about the new listserv system, please contact Kerri Testement at kerriuga@uga.edu by email. Update on USG User Account Standards Audit. The University System of Georgia (USG) recently granted UGA an exception to its User Account Standards, which require institutions to provide an audit every four months of users with access to information systems with sensitive or restricted data, or mission-critical systems. Instead of submitting an audit every four months, UGA may now provide an annual audit. The University has already been taking steps to automate the disabling of user accounts for departing employees within five business days and adjusting user permissions appropriately for employees changing roles at UGA within 30 business days, as remains required of the USG standards. To prepare for the annual audit, University departments are asked to begin planning how to implement documentation of their user access to specified systems. For more information about the USG standards, please point a browser to http://tinyurl.com/qhdwggk or contact Brian Rivers at brivers@uga.edu by email.

2. Support for Student Technology Services Additional eLC Tools Available for Instructors. Desire2Learn, which powers eLearning Commons (eLC), has completed its import of Fall 2013 courses to the new eLC. Instructors who need access to archived course materials and student grades from Blackboard Vista (eLC old) may submit a request by contacting the EITS Help Desk. The Center of Teaching and Learning (CTL) continues to update its eLC tools for instructors, including new videos and Lunch and Learn events focusing on various functions available in eLC. The new instructional resources are available at http://ctl.uga.edu/elc. For more information about eLC, please contact Sherry Clouser at sac@uga.edu by email.
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EITS Status and Activity Report for March 2014

EITS Partnering with Franklin College OIT for Laptop Security Checkups. The Computer Health and Security Fair will be held Tuesday and Wednesday, April 1-2, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., at the Miller Learning Center in the Second Floor Rotunda. During the free event, technical volunteers conduct security checks of the personal laptops of UGA students, faculty and staff, while answering basic computer usage and security questions. For the first time, EITS is partnering with another organization, Franklin Colleges Office of Information Technology (OIT), to provide technical volunteers for the event. The Computer Health and Security Fair continues to grow in popularity among students and employees each semester its held at the MLC. For more information about the Computer Health and Security Fair, please contact Kerri Testement at kerriuga@uga.edu by email.

3. Support for Academic and Administrative Computing Registration, Financial Aid Go-Live Time Approaching for ConnectUGA Project. The ConnectUGA project is moving toward its go-live dates for financial aid and registration. Soon, students will hear more information about registering for fall 2014 classes using the new student information system. Students registering for summer 2014 classes will continue to use OASIS for registration. Teams are in place to develop training, including determining those who need training and what type of delivery is needed for particular groups. Online tutorials are being developed and will be available on the ConnectUGA website. Some groups have already started training for specified components of the new system. Meanwhile, the ConnectUGA project teams continue to convert data for several hundred thousand records while testing components in Banner. For more information about the ConnectUGA project, please point a browser to http://connectuga.uga.edu or contact connect@uga.edu by email. Microsoft to End Support of Windows XP & Office 2003. University departments should be advised and plan accordingly for Microsofts move to end its support of Windows XP and Office 2003, effective April 8, 2014. After that time, Microsoft will not provide any new fixes to those operating systems, thus making any computer using Windows XP and Office 2003 vulnerable to security risks. Without Microsoft technical support or security patches, University computers using those operating systems will be exposed to potential security threats. University departments are encouraged to review their inventory of Windows-based operating systems and plan for updating their computers to a newer operating system. For more information, please point a browser to Microsofts information page at http://tinyurl.com/mnn29f6 or contact Shawn Ellis at spellis@uga.edu by email.

4. Support for Research Galaxy Workshop Available for UGA faculty, students. The Georgia Advanced Computing Resources Center (GACRC) is co-sponsoring a workshop about Galaxy, which is a webbased platform for performing data intensive bioinformatics. The day-long workshop will be led by a Galaxy team featuring software engineers from Johns Hopkins University and Emory University. The workshop will include an introduction and overview of Galaxy basics, along with a focus on RNA-Seq with a worked example. UGA has a Galaxy instance that uses the computational resources provided by the GACRC. Registration for the free workshop is full, but a wait list is available by visiting http://qbcg.uga.edu/galaxyworkshop/. UGAs Institute of Bioinformatics (IOB) and the Quantitative Biology Consulting Group (QBCG) are sponsoring the workshop.

EITS Status and Activity Report for March 2014

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5. Core Campus Infrastructure University Cablevision Available at the HSC. The installation of an alternative fiber optic connection to ensure connectivity to the Health Sciences Campus has been completed. Along with providing additional connectivity and Internet connection redundancy from the main campus to the HSC, the fiber optic cable allows the HSC to offer University Cablevision. EITS has been working with University Housing to switch the HSC residential community to University Cablevision. Other departments may request University Cablevision at the HSC by pointing a web browser to http://eits.uga.edu/support/request/cable. Installation rates and monthly charges also apply. For more information about University Cablevision service at the HSC, please contact Jeff Teasley at jteasley@uga.edu. Additional Systems to Include ArchPass Security: The next phase of implementing ArchPass security will include BigCard, a data processing component of the UGACard system. BigCard will require ArchPass security starting on March 14. The Office of Information Security is developing a plan for including other systems with sensitive or restricted information under ArchPass security, based on the recommendation of the Universitys Administrative Systems Advisory Committee (ASAC). The ArchPass is a method of two-factor authentication that requires a random code generated on a small device, along with a valid MyID, in order to access specified systems with sensitive or restricted information. EITS will notify individual system owners and applicable users about ArchPass security measures. For more information about ArchPass, please point a browser to http://archpass.uga.edu or contact Brian Rivers at brivers@uga.edu by email.

6. Did You Know? Preparations Made for Winter Storm. Prior to the arrival of a major winter storm that resulted in the closure of the University for several days in February, staff at the Boyd Data Center moved emergency cooling equipment in the event the facility lost power. Without cooling equipment, critical servers in the data center are at risk of overheating and causing damage to the equipment. EITS staff also properly turned off servers running non-critical University operations in the event of a sudden power failure. A staff member stayed at the Georgia Center hotel to ensure someone was on site at the data center for 24/7 during the winter storm. EITS services remained unaffected during the winter storm. Help Desk Manager Featured in News Story. UGAs faculty and staff newspaper, Columns, recently featured EITS Help Desk manager Justin Williams in a story giving insight on his rise from a student worker to an IT manager. Williams manages 12 student workers and three full-time staff members at the EITS Help Desk, where hes responsible for managing the day-to-day operations of the Help Desk. The story was also featured on the home page of the main UGA website under Campus Closeup. To read the story, please point a browser to http://tinyurl.com/mfds57z.

University of Georgia students, faculty, and staff, as well as interested others, may subscribe to this monthly report by sending an email to listserv@listserv.uga.edu with the phrase subscribe vpit-news as the body of the message.

EITS Status and Activity Report for March 2014

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