Faculty

Over 13,000 people have moved their CULink account to CU-Boulder’s Gmail service since spring break. The following people were prize winners in our random drawing from everyone who has migrated to Gmail or liked the OIT Facebook or Twitter pages.

Congratulations to:

Winner of the Google Nexus 7 Tablet : Chris Bean

Winners of $25 Google Play Cards: Laura Mitchell & Michael Braverman

The IT Service Center’s hours will change starting Friday, May 10 in accordance with the switch to CU-Boulder campus summer hours. Walk-in hours will be from 7:30 a.m. to 4:00 p.m. Monday through Friday. During the summer, call-in help will be available from 7:30 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. Monday through Friday while Saturday and Sunday hours will remain 12 noon to 6:00 p.m. Learn more about the IT Service Center and other walk-in support centers at www.colorado.edu/oit/service-center. 

The OIT website has a new look and new functionality thanks to changes to the menu. Now when you navigate through the site you will notice there is no longer a menu on the right side of pages. This change allows the page content to be wider and the pages more visually clean. There are also arrows above the left-side menu that make it possible to move between levels of the selected website section. And the breadcrumbs—your navigation trail through the website—are now dynamic. When you hover over a breadcrumb the menu changes to the submenu from the highlighted page.

With the impending retirement of CULink and the moving of e-mail accounts to Gmail and Microsoft Office 365, the way display names are managed will change too. A display name is the name in the From line that an e-mail recipient sees. This change will not impact the delivery of e-mail, but in some cases, it might change the way someone's name appears on outgoing e-mails.

The Office of Information Technology is improving the network registration system on our campus. The next phase will involve deployment on the campus wireless network in academic and administrative buildings starting on May 15. OIT knows that the campus network, including UCB wireless, is a resource you rely on for accessing a wide variety of university and Internet resources. Keeping the network secure is critical to making sure the network is available and reliable. Network registration is an important part of keeping the network secure.

OIT is expanding its reach to the campus community through several new social media channels, including Facebook, Google+, Twitter and YouTube. OIT Communications has launched this effort in alignment with CU-Boulder’s broader social media efforts led by University Communications, to ensure all social media communications are coordinated and complementary.

Social Media Goals

Registering to use the campus network is something most of us take for granted but it is a crucial step toward keeping the campus network secure. This fall the IT Security Office has been leading a project to upgrade the software and hardware that enable network registration on our campus.

What you should know about the upgrade:

Our campus is constantly under attack by a barrage of attempts to steal personal information (aka phishing). Often these attacks come during holidays or breaks when campus IT support is unavailable. Even when you can’t contact the IT Service Center there are still clues and resources to help you figure out if the e-mail you have received is legitimate or a phishing attempt.

Often technology is improved by an upgrade, but sometimes a simpler solution is needed. To optimize the lists.colorado.edu service, OIT is applying good old fashioned elbow grease by working to clean up old, outdated and unused lists.

During the past year the campus online learning environment has moved from CULearn to Desire2Learn (D2L). And now the transition is complete; CULearn was retired August 31st.

Many faculty across campus have been using D2L for their courses, research, and work groups during the past three semesters. They have experimented with D2L’s extensive set of tools, which can help make teaching and learning easier and more effective. Now we want to help you make the move to D2L, too.

In the effort to improve our campus network infrastructure so that it can support faster network speeds, the next step will involve upgrading network switches across the campus. From September through November, the Office of Information Technology (OIT) will work in coordination with a local contractor to upgrade network switches in buildings throughout campus.

Our campus now has a new way for you to meet, collaborate and share information with anyone from around the world from virtually any device. It’s called Adobe Connect and it allows you to share your computer screen; create whiteboards; use text, audio and video chat; and much more all through your web browser window. Since the service is provided as a common good (there’s no direct cost for using the service), it can replace paid alternatives like WebEx and GoToMeeting.

Over the next several months OIT will be working to update how computers authenticate when connecting to the campus wireless network and the wired networks in the residence halls. The existing network registration system, which ties a computer’s MAC address to an Identikey, has been in place for many years. Due to performance and security concerns the system needs to be replaced. To minimize the impact to the campus community the new registration process will closely resemble the existing network registration process, and this change, once in place, will be largely transparent.

As this semester comes to an end, OIT has a few D2L related end-of-semester housekeeping reminders and a sneak peak at the new login page which will be in place for the fall 2013 semester.