To be alerted about upcoming IT town hall meetings, view the meeting slides, and to subscribe to our mailing list, please visit the town hall website at www.montana.edu/itcenter/townhall.
Here are the topics discussed during the meeting:
WiFi Upgrades
The second round of IT Center capital funds have been
released to continue upgrading the WiFi infrastructure around campus. We have
also received additional funds from the Provost’s Office to accelerate the
upgrades in student and instructional areas as well as from the Computer Fee
Allocation Committee (CFAC) to improve wireless in student spaces. The Bozeman
IT Governance Council will assist with building prioritization as we move forward.
Here is a list of the status of WiFi upgrades*:
COMPLETED:
Renne
Library
SUB
Montana
Hall
Gaines Hall
*Please send any WiFi performance related issues in these
buildings to helpdesk@montana.edu.
COMPLETED BY MAY:
Wilson Hall
Roberts
Hall
AJMJ (thanks to the Provost’s
investment)
Swingle
Student Health
COMPLETED BY THIS SUMMER:
Cobleigh
Hall (5th and 6th floor)
Reid Hall
(student and instructional areas)
IPAM
After evaluating numerous responses to the IP Address
Management (IPAM) bid, we finally made an award to InfoBlox. During the initial
deployment of the IPAM appliance, we will move all current DNS/DHCP information
from our current legacy system to the new appliance. We will then begin working
with the campus community to systematically transfer everyone’s machines from
static addressing to DHCP. This move will coincide with the new redesign of the
network core, the creation of network zones to allow for better network security,
and the more prudent use of private network addressing. The IT Center will work
with the distributed IT and user community to come up with an upgrade strategy
that will be the least disruptive time for each department or building. This
could be a year-long process. We will have to bring in some form of support and
effort to touch over 19,000 static IP addresses. The details are still being developed
and we look forward to your continued input and support.
Email Improvements
The IT Center is
currently in the pilot phase of upgrading our existing Microsoft Exchange email
servers to Microsoft Office365. Meetings are being scheduled in the coming
weeks with Microsoft architects for gap analysis and to develop a migration plan.
We are also looking at our MSU Active Directory domain and determining changes
and upgrades that would be required for, or enhance the features of Office365. We
expect the Office365 environment to be ready for general use by next fall and
we’ll spend the beginning of the academic year migrating users. The legacy
Exchange system will be shut down by the summer of 2014.
In anticipation of email improvements, effective April 1st, the IT Center will no longer charge for increases to user’s email quota above the default 200 MB quota. If you need to increase your storage space, please email helpdesk@montana.edu. However, we continue to ask the user community to still be good stewards of campus resources and practice good e-mail management. We don’t want to have to go out and buy more disk storage just months before we eventually plan on shutting down the system.
IT Governance
Both the 1MSU IT Council and Bozeman IT Council will be
meeting over the next two weeks.
The 1MSU IT Council will review each campus’s initiatives and
needs, look at system-wide opportunities to operate as 1MSU (such as digital
imaging), and begin project scoping and RMA processing.
The Bozeman IT Council will examine the Bozeman technology portfolio
and help prioritize projects in the queue and/or identify and allocate
resources in the execution of those projects.
Electronic Document Management & Workflow
The Electronic Document Management & Workflow (EDMW)
project will be one of the first OpenMSU projects implemented under the guidance
of the PMO. This will be a large step forward in reducing the amount of paper
that we manually process and move around on campus. Not only will it allow for
the electronic routing of forms for approval, it will also provide for
electronic storage, easy search and retrieval, and archiving of electronic
documents. Some processes at MSU will continue to be paper based and others
will be converted into electronic-only forms. We will also be looking at the
process itself. Does this form still need 20 signatures or could it really only
use two signatures and thus, arrive at its destination more efficiently? This
initiative will make our lives much easier, faculty, staff, and students alike!
The project is currently in the Planning stage. We will be
concluding research on potential solutions this spring, evaluating options this
summer, and designing the implementation this summer and upcoming fall.
The Implementation stage will consist of conducting and
evaluating a pilot in the Fall 2013 semester and beginning a production rollout
in the Spring 2014 semester. Processes in Financial Aid or HR could be good
pilot projects.
This is a very large undertaking that will affect all
departments and all campuses. Professional services will be leveraged in order to make
this a smooth and effective transition. We will have to have outside support
come in and help us set up the software and processes within MSU and then our
own technical teams will have to help integrate it into Banner. It is still
debatable on how to prioritize areas for implementation.
Get involved! Subscribe to ecm@montana.edu to stay in the loop
with the EDMW project. You can also follow the progress of EDMW and other
projects at www.montana.edu/pmo/portfolio.
Furthermore, you can email pmo@montana.edu with suggestions,
questions, concerns, comments, and just to join the fun!
Stay tuned to learn more about the next IT town hall meeting!
The exact date of the next town hall
meeting is still to be determined but you can expect it to be around
late May/early June. We have also
set up a town hall listserv where we will make announcements about
upcoming
events and provide follow-up to past meetings. Subscribe to the mailing
list by
visiting www.montana.edu/itcenter/townhall.
