Faculty

OIT Selects New Vendor for Service Management Tool

The Office of Information Technology (OIT), in collaboration with faculty, staff and students, has chosen a new IT Service Management tool to facilitate IT support across campus. The tool, provided by ServiceNow, will replace the current SupportWorks system in the coming months.  

Timeline

• OIT will be working diligently throughout the summer to work with partner IT organizations to implement this tool.

Background

The campus VPN service now includes a mobile app that allows Apple devices to use the VPN. Junos Pulse is a free application available in the Apple App Store. The campus VPN allows you to make a secure on-campus network connection, when you are off campus or on UCB Wireless, so you can access restricted campus services such as library resources or file servers. Currently CU-Boulder does not officially support a VPN option for Android users. Although, there is a Junos Pulse application for Android, it does not have full functionality and is not recommended.

To: Boulder Campus Teaching Faculty, Deans, Directors, Dept Chairs

Sender: Deborah Keyek-Franssen, Ph.D., Director of Academic Technology

From: Office of Information Technology

Request Desire2Learn (D2L) for Your Summer Course

Now is the time to request an online learning environment for summer courses. Faculty are strongly encouraged to use D2L, because CULearn will be unavailable after the summer 2012 terms.

The campus has recently been targeted by malicious e-mails that appear to be attempts to gain user information by asking recipients to login to a spoofed e-mail login page. Individuals who received these e-mails should simply delete the messages. The campus IT Security Office is taking steps to block connections from campus to this phishing site.

Following is a sample message:

From: University of Colorado
Date: Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 1:51 PM
Subject: Important Account Maintenance

The Accellion Secure File Transfer service is getting a face lift and a name change. The new name of the service is CU-Boulder Large File Transfer which puts the name of the service in line with the primary function of the service—sharing large files with colleagues.

Studying the earth’s snow and ice can create a lot of heat. Cooling the National Snow and Ice Data Center’s computer room, where researchers from around the world access data about the earth’s snow and ice, used to require over 300,000 kilowatt-hours of energy per year or enough to power 34 homes. “There was a certain irony that here we are working on climate research and our data center was consuming an awful lot of power,” said David Gallaher, Technical Services Manager for NSIDC.

The campus has recently been targeted by malicious e-mails that appear to be attempts to gain user information such as passwords. One recent phishing e-mail was supposedly from “CULink Email Alert” urging account owners to submit personal information for account verification. Individuals who received this e-mail should simply delete the message.

If you or someone in your department responded to the CULink phishing attempt and entered user information, that person should contact the IT Service Center during regular business hours at 303-735-4357 (5-HELP from a campus phone).

Keeping up to date with the latest IT news, security notices, service alerts and project updates doesn’t need to be a time consuming process. That’s because the OIT website has all this information and more, most of it available as a subscription-based RSS feed.

Why shop around for software when in many cases you can get it through the campus for discounted prices or in some cases no user fee at all. The campus site licensing webpage is your key to finding the best deals on our campus for Microsoft and Apple office applications and operating systems for faculty and staff computers, as well as curriculum-specific software for statistics, graphing, math and research for students, faculty and staff.  

In an effort to better gauge the level of customer satisfaction, OIT recently began sending a one-question survey to randomly selected customers of the IT Service Center and OIT Desktop Support. The survey simply asks whether the customer was satisfied with the service they received. After indicating Yes or No, the respondent is offered the opportunity to provide additional feedback.

A number of Internet service providers have recently begun blocking messages from the Colorado.edu domain after an account on campus was compromised and started sending spam. The account has since been disabled but the Office of Information Technology (OIT) is aware of the following ISPs that are currently blocking some messages from our campus: AOL, Comcast, Road Runner and Jefferson County.

The campus has recently been targeted by malicious e-mails that appear to be attempts to gain user information such as passwords. One recent phishing e-mail was supposedly from the CULink Abuse Team urging account owners to take action to prevent account termination. Individuals who received this e-mail should simply delete the message.

If you or someone in your department responded to the CULink phishing attempt and entered user information, that person should contact the IT Service Center during regular business hours at 303-735-4357 (5-HELP from a campus phone).

Discover all the documentation and training offered by the university to help you get oriented to Exchange.

If your account was recently moved to Exchange, and you’re still trying to understand all that it has to offer, let our documentation, training and online resources be your guide. Exchange is optimized for use with Microsoft Outlook but it also works seamlessly with a wide variety of e-mail and calendaring programs that are supported by our campus. Follow the links below to discover these invaluable Exchange resources.

To: Boulder Campus Teaching Faculty, Deans, Directors, Dept Chairs
Sender: Deborah Keyek-Franssen, Ph.D., Director of Academic Technology
From: Office of Information Technology
Date: Thursday, January 5, 2012
Subject: Request a Desire2Learn Environment for Your Course

When you need to brush up on software basics but don’t have the time to attend a training session, OIT’s Training pages are still your one-stop destination. Here you will find everything from online courses and videos to reference books and step-by-step tutorials.

From the Training page you can link to the multitude of online training modules, test prep, and online books available in SkillSoft.