The University is announcing device requirements for new and continuing UConn students. (more…)

ITS is making a change to Webex tonight, April 15, that will enable better protection of meetings.

The incidence of uninvited and disruptive guests crashing video conferencing meetings has increased. In response, ITS is implementing a change in Webex to better protect against these intrusions. Starting at 10:00 pm tonight, all personal meeting rooms will be “locked” by default. When participants join the locked conference, they will wait in the “lobby” until admitted by the meeting host. The host can admit some, all, or none of the participants. When using WebEx as a telephone bridge, the host will need to unlock the room by pressing *5 to allow entry. Hosts may also adjust or disable the personal lock settings in advance but should be aware of the potential risk.

If a disruption occurs, the host should first expel the participant and then report the incident to techsupport@uconn.edu (please include your NetID and the time/date of the meeting). Below are how-to articles that will help you manage your room and lock settings.

If you have questions or need assistance, please do not hesitate to contact us at techsupport@uconn.edu.

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Securing Your WebEx Meeting

Adjusting Personal Room Automatic Lock Settings

Managing Participants

Using WebEx as a Telephone Bridge

ITS has received reports that access to the personal (P) drive is intermittently degraded. (more…)

The ITS major storage subsystem has been experiencing intermittent performance problems. (more…)

ITS has created an IT Community site (itcommunity.uconn.edu) designed to provide our technical colleagues and stakeholders with information germane to their positions and professional interests at the University. (more…)

ITS is announcing upcoming changes to the University’s student-use Adobe contract. (more…)

ITS has been developing a vision for expanding and enhancing service delivery to all UConn campuses. (more…)

Phishing is the attempt to obtain sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, social security numbers, and credit card details (and, indirectly, money), often for malicious reasons, by disguising as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. (more…)

ITS has updated centrally licensed software.

Individual software is a general IT resource that impacts every part of our community, allowing each of us to be more successful in our respective roles.  (more…)

Updates to the PeopleSoft Student Administration System (Student Admin) have enhanced its support resources and improved its landing page. (more…)

ITS will have a moratorium on non-emergency network and system changes starting Wednesday, January 11, through Monday, January 23. (more…)

Google Apps for Education was chosen for students because it was both a good fit for and a strong preference of this population.  (more…)

Google Apps for Education was chosen for students because it was both a good fit for and a strong preference of this population.  (more…)

Over the past year, ITS has made strategic investments in data storage infrastructure in support of institutional and research activities.   (more…)

Cisco Meeting Server (CMS) bridge is now available for video conferencing.

(more…)

A pilot version of Kaltura is available to UConn instructors and students. (more…)

ITS has two new service offerings for our community. (more…)

ITS has expanded the available storage space on personal (P:) drives. (more…)

ITS has established structural changes in order to address our current identity management issues. (more…)

Our frontline source for reporting up-to-date information about central systems is the IT Systems Status site.  (more…)

As with any technology, the University’s web servers and supporting resources evolve over time, offering more sophisticated features and better performance. (more…)

We designed the IT All Staff Conference with our IT community in mind; we wanted to create an environment conducive to networking and a forum where IT staff could share their accomplishments. (more…)

As a central provider of IT services, ITS is responsible for licensing, procuring, delivering, and maintaining software delivered at an institutional level.   (more…)

ITS will implement firewall changes on September 13^th that will impact the university wireless network. (more…)

New Dell computers ordered on or after Monday, August 22^nd through the HuskyPC program will ship with Windows 10 (Win10) as the installed operating system. (more…)

The Schrödinger Small-Molecule Drug Discovery Suite is now available to UConn faculty, staff, and students on all campuses. (more…)

ITS has updated automatic Q: drive mapping on ITS managed workstations. (more…)

ITS has begun a campaign to encourage our UConn community to set password recovery options for their NetID accounts. (more…)

Expanded access to the MathWorks MATLAB software will be available to UConn faculty, staff, and students on all campuses, including Farmington, beginning July 1, 2016. (more…)

eSignLive, a web based electronic signature product, is now available for use by university departments, schools, and colleges. (more…)

We are writing to share our plans for the persistence of student email accounts.   (more…)

Message encryption and rights management is preliminarily available on the university’s Office 365 email system.   (more…)

ITS will have a moratorium on non-emergency network and system changes starting Friday, April 29 through Saturday, May 14, 2016.  (more…)

A number of concerns about the voicemail to email integration have been surfaced by university stakeholders.  (more…)

UConn and many other universities were recently victims of a network attack where unrestricted, Internet accessible printers were remotely activated and used to print offensive propaganda.  (more…)

A little over a year ago, we finalized UConn’s five-year strategic plan for information technology.  (more…)

Plus Email Addressing, also known as sub-addressing, allows you to create variations of a normal email address that will still be delivered to your institutional email account.   (more…)

Threats to personal and institutional information security are an ongoing reality for network connected individuals and organizations.  (more…)

Understanding the relationship between services and our community is the key to effectively meeting the needs of our constituents and is the primary perspective that informed the design of our models for service delivery. (more…)

While public broadcast and cable television throughout the country were required to transition from analog to digital, private installations like we have at the University did not have this obligation. (more…)

External access to restricted university resources has traditionally been provided via our authenticated Virtual Private Network (VPN) service.  (more…)

Portfolio is a tool within UConn’s Blackboard learning management system that enables instructors and students to collect, organize, and share completed work.  (more…)

The Information Security Office would like to share draft information security and technology policies and to ask for your review and feedback before they are finalized. (more…)

On Sunday, December 27^th, the University of Connecticut was the victim of an IT service compromise. (more…)

ITS will be replacing the voicemail system for faculty and staff on the UConn Storrs campus. (more…)

ITS will have a moratorium on non-emergency network and system changes starting Sunday, December 13 through Thursday, December 24, 2015. (more…)

ITS would like to let you know about an opportunity to preview our new application virtualization service, UConn AnyWare. (more…)

ITS has made changes to our IT community mailing lists.

We maintain an IT Contacts mailing list that is delivered through our listserv environment and includes all ITS staff, university-wide IT staff, and other stakeholders with a vested interest in IT.  (more…)

The final exam schedule for the Storrs campus has, in recent years, been generated within a software package that the university utilizes to manage room resources. (more…)

A year ago, ITS published the final version of our 2014 – 2018 Strategic Plan, a culmination of a collaborative development and review process.  (more…)

ITS is preparing to reinstate Identity Finder. (more…)

The goal of all university IT, both central and distributed, is to ensure the secure and robust operation of institutional IT assets for our UConn community.  (more…)

The process for requesting and activating NetIDadmin accounts has been improved.  (more…)

UConn instructors leverage our learning management system, HuskyCT, for a wide range of activities, from supplementing coursework to delivering online classes that extend the University’s reach beyond the campuses.  (more…)

When rogue email accounts are used to spam the internet, downstream providers typically respond by blocking all email from the source server.  (more…)

During this past week, the university community experienced intermittent outages and performance issues with network connectivity.  (more…)

ITS has launched a revamped version of the university’s mobile application myUConn. (more…)

ITS will have a moratorium on non-emergency network and system changes starting Wednesday, August 26, through Monday, September 14. (more…)

ITS will deploy an update of the NetID Single Sign On prompt on Tuesday, August 18. (more…)

ITS is happy to announce that the migration of Genesys from UConn to PSR went smoothly and our local mainframe is now decommissioned. (more…)

This is the final update about our local mainframe decommissioning and its transition to an external provider. (more…)

HuskyVision will be transferred from analog to digital broadcast television for the fall semester. (more…)

A power shutdown in the Math-Science Building (MSB) is tentatively scheduled for Saturday, August 8^th between 5:00 am – 5:00 pm. (more…)

ITS has developed a new configuration for our high-tech classroom computers. (more…)

Below is an update on our progress developing High Availability (HA) capabilities for ITS systems and services.

HA represents continuous service delivery under normal circumstances and rapid restoration in the event of disruption. (more…)

ITS has been actively engaged in moving off the mainframe to other platforms for the past two years, and this process is now approaching completion. (more…)

We would like to share information about individual web conferencing services available to the UConn community. (more…)

HuskyCT, our learning management system, is now in a High Availability (HA) configuration. (more…)

Solution Development Life Cycle (SDLC) tools are available to the UConn IT community. (more…)

ITS has a proposed design for expanding the University’s application virtualization service offerings. (more…)

ITS has temporarily disabled Identity Finder while we finalize the long-range plans for the service.

(more…)

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.  (more…)

The HuskyTime student time card system is now available to the university community.

ITS worked closely with UConn Recreation to develop HuskyTime, a streamlined web-based application that allows students to enter their time into an online time card (more…)

ITS will have a moratorium on non-emergency network and system changes starting Friday, May 1 through Friday, May 15. (more…)

For faculty and staff interested in learning more about Office 365, ITS and Microsoft are co-hosting a free presentation (more…)

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We would like to remind our IT community that ITS is hosting a town hall meeting to discuss the upcoming migration to Microsoft Office 365 tomorrow, April 1^st at 9:00 a.m. in the Dodd Konover Auditorium. (more…)

We are offering the opportunity to migrate to Office 365 prior to the university-wide deployment scheduled to start at 5:00 pm on April 10^th. (more…)

We would like to remind our IT community that ITS is hosting a town hall meeting to discuss the upcoming migration to Microsoft Office 365 tomorrow, March 25^th at 9:00 a.m. in the Dodd Konover Auditorium. (more…)

We are inviting members of our IT community to a town hall meeting to discuss the upcoming migration to Microsoft Office 365 and initiate a conversation about support strategies. (more…)

Faculty and staff who have accounts on the central university email and calendar service, please be aware of the university migration from our local Exchange environment to Microsoft Office 365, currently scheduled to start April 10th. (more…)

The Remote Desktop Gateway server is an authentication and proxy mechanism used widely by off-site faculty, staff, and students to connect to on-site university computers using the Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP).  The University began blocking RDP at the border firewall in 2012 in response to an RDP security weakness.  (more…)

The mainframe computer, which UConn has used for over 30 years, was one of the only computing platforms available to the UConn community and has historically been used for administrative, academic, research, and personal computing.  ITS has been moving off the mainframe (more…)

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 ITS CAB website.  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 two-week moratorium on non-emergency network and system changes starting Monday, January 19, through Monday, February 2.

We understand that this time is a critical period for students and faculty as they acclimate to the new semester.  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.

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 des

The ITS Technology Support 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 Technology Support 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 Technology Support 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 beginning a series of infrastructure enhancements that may require updating end-of-life (EOL) operating systems on devices that are connected to the network.

ITS announced this past spring and throughout the summer that Windows XP and Mac OS 10.7 were end of life and would no longer be supported.  Older operating systems are not maintained by the vendor and are increasingly difficult to operate in our environment.  We will offer possible workarounds where these exist, but ITS cannot avoid important maintenance in deference to devices with unsupported operating systems.  Unfortunately, such equipment will be increasingly unable to utilize network services over time.

We will be happy to explore options with you.  Please do not hesitate to contact us for information and assistance.

ITS is expanding its enterprise workflow services by offering web form development with IBM Forms Experience Builder (FEB).

The University currently uses many paper-based workflow processes, which can be both slow and inefficient.  Automating these processes by creating electronic workflows using traditional programming languages, however, is both difficult and time consuming.  FEB is a tool designed specifically to develop and deploy data-centric web form applications.  It is simpler to use and far faster from concept to production than older approaches.  With FEB, the Applications and Technology Solutions (ATS) group can produce better results in less time (less cost) and even add advanced functionality such as workflow stages or the ability to track and analyze results.

Additional information about FEB is available at the following location: https://its.uconn.edu/.  Requests for form development can be sent to http://serviceit.uconn.edu/.

The upgraded and expanded Virtual Private Network (VPN) services, deployed on September 15th, have replaced the old VPN portal. On October 6th the old system, vpn.uconn.edu, will no longer be available.

The new VPN portal is accessible via the Web at https://sslvpn.uconn.edu and via client software for OS X, Windows, iOS, and Android devices. When you transition to the new VPN services, be aware that you will need to re-create your personal bookmarks and that clients receive different IP addresses than the legacy system.

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

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 at365@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.

As of June 30, 2014, ITS will no longer provide print services from the mainframe. In conjunction with the Mainframe Decommissioning Project and the University’s green initiatives, all print jobs processed on the mainframe will be directed to Control-D, an online report management tool that is currently in use by many areas.

Control-D provides the option to view reports online and print all or specific selections of the report. Users will have the option to print directly from personal computers as they do today or through UConn’s Design & Document Production Center.

If you have an existing job scheduled that produces a report and have not been contacted by ITS to determine your report distribution requirements please email us at ITS.mainframe@uconn.edu or call Diana O’Donnell at 860-486-1413.

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.

ITS has added a data service option to university-owned iPads and laptops for faculty and staff who are eligible for university cellular services.

ITS Cellular Services has long supported data service and hotspot capabilities for university-owned smartphones and other dedicated hotspot devices. Hotspot allows a device to share its cellular data capabilities with a collection of other devices in its vicinity. This is not necessarily the highest performing or most convenient approach, but it is often effective and economical for modest, infrequent sharing. We have received feedback that it often does not adequately address other relevant use cases. Hotspots will continue to be supported, but the ability to add cellular data plans directly to other university-owned devices will allow the community to select mobile services that better meet their needs.
General information about mobile services and specific information about the features and rates can be obtained by navigating to www.cellular.uconn.edu and clicking on Types of Services.

ITS has procured Adobe Creative Cloud for students as both a download and through SkyBox.

Adobe Creative Cloud is a bundle of the most popular Adobe products (e.g., Acrobat Pro, Photoshop, etc.) obtained through an annual leasing agreement.  The normal institutional model for this Adobe bundle consists of an unlimited enterprise license for all faculty and staff with student licensing obtained as a fixed quantity add-on to the base agreement.  Adobe has not historically supported making these student licenses usable through virtualized environments.  These conditions were not a match for our needs at UConn, where not enough faculty and staff require the software to justify an enterprise site license and providing the software on SkyBox, the UConn virtualized desktop environment, is key to maximizing student access.  Working closely with university purchasing and leveraging perspective and information from the UConn technical community, ITS broke new ground with Adobe to negotiate an independent fixed license pool for students with approval to deliver it through SkyBox.  These licensing terms are unprecedented and will  significantly increase student access to the software at a nationally competitive price.  Additional details about the Adobe Creative Cloud bundle will be made broadly available before the start of the fall semester.

ITS performed successful upgrades to the data center on Saturday, May 31, 2014. During the planned outage, ITS infrastructure staff installed new equipment and performed preventative maintenance. Although some services were disrupted during the outage, access remained to the Network, e-mail, and UConn websites.

Thank you for your patience during the outage. The upgrades are part of a plan to ensure a robust infrastructure that enhances the performance and stability of ITS systems and services.

If you have any questions, please contact the ITS Technology Support Center at serviceit.uconn.edu.

ITS has implemented infrastructure changes to permit high availability capabilities for our services.

Contemporary IT system and service robustness is best accomplished through a three tier model consisting of 1) effective design and professional practices 2) high availability through infrastructure and operating diversity 3) disaster recovery as an insurance strategy using an external vendor specialist.  The first strategy has been our historical approach and the organization is actively pursuing the third strategy.  ITS has added high availability capability by implementing custom network connectivity between our primary data center in Gant and our secondary machine room in HBL.  This multi-site data center capability allows us to deliver virtualized services from two independent locations as a single extended offering.

Our primary data center in Gant will undergo disruptive upgrades to both power and environmentals this weekend that will result in a 12-18 hour loss of services from this location.  By diversifying a number of our generically consumed services between our paired data centers using our new high availability infrastructure, UTIS will be maintaining the following services without substantive interruption during the upgrades to the Gant data center.

• Networking (wired and wireless)
• Email (Microsoft Exchange)
• Authentication (NetID, AD, Radius, CAS, etc)
• Departmental web content management (Aurora)
• University core websites (alert, it status, today, uconn)

Delivery from the secondary HBL location will begin almost immediately as the primary delivery location is shutdown.  Any disruption of these services during failover will be extremely brief and should be virtually unnoticed.  Outages have an increasingly disruptive impact on our community and we will continue to pursue high availability as well as other architectural and operational strategies to improve the performance and stability of ITS systems and services.

ITS has increased the sensitivity of the UCONN email spam filters to more effectively prevent the delivery of unwanted messages.

The university email challenge has always been to correctly identify and prevent the delivery of unwanted messages without misidentifying and blocking wanted messages.  Recent feedback from our community indicated that the system was permitting the delivery of too much spam.  ITS carefully assessed the service configuration and implemented adjustments this morning to improve its filtering performance.  Our tests indicate that this will safely reduce spam delivery by approximately 20%.

Please do not hesitate to contact us or the ITS Technology Support Center if you have questions or concerns or if you believe that your email is being blocked incorrectly.

ITS has enabled guest access to WhatsUp, the university network monitoring system.

ITS network technicians utilize WhatsUp to monitor the current status of more than 3,000 network devices in our data network.  This tool is not designed or intended to be a generally consumed service at the University, but it is possible that it might be useful for other IT professionals.  We have enabled read-only access to WhatsUp from any campus network.  You may login using “guest” as both the username and password.  Off campus access to this resource requires use of the University VPN service.

The six minute limit on ITS Technology Support Center phone system hold times has been discontinued.

This limit was originally created to address feedback pertaining to long holds, but it has become clear that it is not the optimal way to deal with this issue and it has the unintended side effect of forcibly disconnecting people who might have preferred to continue holding.  ITS wants to make it easier for the community to access help resources, and so callers on hold will be periodically prompted with three options:

• Leave a message
• Create a ticket through ServiceIT
• Continue to hold

ITS will continue our review of help desk processes to increase call throughput, but in the interim we believe that the range of options above will better meet the different needs of individual callers.

There will be a two-week ITS moratorium on network and system changes starting today, Friday, May 2, through Friday, May 16.

We understand that this time of year is a critical period with students and faculty trying to meet end of semester obligations.  ITS has imposed significant restrictions on 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.

There are a number of general phone and email contact points that provide access to ITS groups and / or services. When submitting a help or service request, we encourage everyone to contact the organization through either the Technology Support Center or one of the local Service Areas. However, we have received feedback that these mechanisms are not always helpful when trying to contact specific individuals. Now we’re changing that.

ITS is now aggressively ensuring that individual phone numbers and email addresses will be properly available in the University’s online phone book. We will also maintain a staff directory, as we want the community to be able to easily contact us at both the organizational and individual level for all of their IT needs.

ITS has added authentication support to its Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) server, resulting in more flexibility and convenience for SMTP users.

Customers that utilize Outlook and Exchange for email already take advantage of authenticated access for outgoing emails, but our generally available SMTP server has not historically supported authenticated access. A consequence of this is that ITS blocks access from off-campus locations to the SMTP server when sending emails. This limitation has required laptops that access the SMTP server directly from off-campus locations to either have a separate configuration using a different SMTP server or to utilize the University’s Virtual Private Network (VPN) when sending email. Enabling authentication capabilities on the SMTP server allows ITS to fully support direct access to the SMTP server from areas outside of our network, limiting complexity and potentially reducing the support needs of our community.

Mail clients configured to utilize smtp.uconn.edu directly can use SMTP authentication through either SSL on port 465 or STARTTLS on port 587. The authentication credentials are simply your NetID and password. Outlook or other clients that use Exchange directly will not require reconfiguration and adjustment – they will simply continue to operate as they do now.

For assistance on configuring ports for SMTP Authentication, users can contact the ITS Technology Support Center by submitting a ticket at http://serviceit.uconn.edu.

ITS has procured an InCommon Certificate Service for the University in response to the recent Heartbleed exploit in the OpenSSL cryptographic software library. This service allows us to generate, for all UConn Domains, an unlimited number of certificates (e.g., SSL, extended validation, client, and code signing) that are validated by a trusted Certificate Authority.

Technical staff across the Institution aggressively responded to the recent Heartbleed exploit and updated University servers. Heartbleed attacked an OpenSSL vulnerability in order to obtain private data. It is possible that some certificates were compromised and it would be wise to replace any that might have been exposed. You may replace your certificates at no departmental cost by using the ITS fully subsidized InCommon Certificate Service.

Additional information on the new service can be found at https://its.uconn.edu/ssl-certificate-service/.

The SafeConnect environment has provided a number of operating and management benefits to the university. It has, however, also generated a significant number of support problems for the community. ITS recently deployed a new version of the environment. It did not adequately address the long-standing support challenges and, after careful consideration of the product and based on direct feedback from the community, it has been permanently disabled. ITS will pursue other, less intrusive, approaches to replace the capabilities that SafeConnect previously provided.

The SafeConnect client that is currently installed on computers will no longer prevent access to the university network and it may be uninstalled at your convenience. If no action is taken, it will automatically uninstall itself after approximately six months of inactivity.

The IT Partners program is a streamlined governance structure consisting of three standing committees that are organized to provide clear roles, to prevent overlapping effort, and to align participants to focus areas. They provide oversight of University Information Technology and Services (ITS) systems and services and are advisory to the University CIO regarding the efficacy of existing or proposed central IT initiatives.

View the governance structure on the IT Strategy website at itstrategy.uconn.edu/governance-structure.

The following is an announcement from the CIO.

Colleagues,

I am contacting you to provide an update on the ongoing discussions between ITS and SAIT regarding opportunities for integration. The goal of these discussions has been to provide the best practical outcome for the community, and it has become clear that HuskyTech’s excellent service and support to the student community would be complimentary to other ITS support services. Effective March 31, 2014, HuskyTech will report to Pat Meinweiser. Please join me in welcoming this enthusiastic and effective group to the ITS family.

As always, you are encouraged to contact me if you have questions or concerns.

Regards.

Michael.
—
Michael R. Mundrane, Ph.D.
Vice Provost for Information Technology and Chief Information Officer
University of Connecticut
Phone: 860.486.1777