Author Archives: Dana Fair, ITS Communications
Update 10/26/2022: Pendse, Curley, and Shumaker won ORBIE awards. The Michigan CIO Leadership Association (MichiganCIO) recently announced that Ravi Pendse, vice president for information technology and chief information officer, will receive the 2022 MichiganCIO Leadership ORBIE Award on Friday, October 21, 2022, at The Henry, 300 Town Center Drive, in Dearborn. “I am humbled to receive the ORBIE… Read More »
U-M’s move from Box to Dropbox has gone amazingly well, as the window for scheduling migrations is coming to a close on October 31. The faculty, staff, and students on top of their game have scheduled over 345 terabytes of data to be migrated since last spring, when the process officially began. By comparison, that amounts to more… Read More »
University community members can now schedule their migration from U-M Box to U-M Dropbox or delete their Box account.
The U-M Box to U-M Dropbox migrations are beginning in June and will continue throughout the spring and summer on a rolling basis. Faculty and staff will be notified by the Unit Ambassador associated with their school, college, or unit as to when they can begin using the self-service migration tool, which has been designed to make the… Read More »
Information and Technology Services is working closely with Box Retirement Unit Ambassadors to empower faculty, staff, and students to migrate their data from U-M Box to U-M Dropbox before December 1, 2021. Unit Ambassadors are collaborating with the Box Retirement Project team to ensure the university’s needs are met, and serving as a point of contact between ITS,… Read More »
Updating the incident process will increase effectiveness and enhance the overall experience.
Great news: Zoom for Health at U-M no longer exists! Thanks to the collaborative efforts of U-M and Zoom, U-M Zoom was approved for PHI (HIPAA data). As a result, Zoom for Health users’ accounts were migrated into regular U-M Zoom at the very start of 2021, making all university Zoom users members of the same Zoom service.… Read More »
Information and Technology Services (ITS) has been overseeing the technical aspects of U-M’s recent effort to implement the guest version of ResponsiBLUE, the health-screening tool developed to help keep the university healthy and reduce the spread of COVID-19. The State of Michigan now requires all visitors, contractors and vendors through April 14, 2021, to complete a preliminary health… Read More »
This year, Information and Technology Services has been implementing Deque Comply – a best-in-market, cloud-based enterprise accessibility scanner. The product, which is switching its name to Axe Monitor, is designed to help schools, colleges and units have a clearer understanding of the accessibility effectiveness of their websites, and to be able to assess how they are doing. The… Read More »
The University of Michigan recently launched the accessible, mobile-friendly website ResponsiBLUE (responsiblue.umich.edu) to help keep university community members healthy and reduce the spread of COVID-19. A downloadable mobile app for both Android and Apple platforms is in development and will be available soon. All faculty, staff and students entering U-M buildings are required to use ResponsiBLUE to meet… Read More »
Most people by now are familiar with the steps necessary to make their own videoconferences secure. But what should you do if you happen to be participating in a videoconference that experiences some type of interruption, such as a Zoombomb. Disruptions can include anything from the mundane – barking dog or crying children, unintentional screen sharing, or dissonant noises… Read More »
Information and Technology Services recently informed Winter 2020 and Summer 2020 graduates that they are eligible for four more months of Adobe Creative Cloud at no cost. “It’s not lost on anyone that the journey for our recent graduates from college to what’s next in their career is different from those who have gone before,” said Ravi Pendse,… Read More »
A Zoom beta feature is now available, providing automatic live transcription for meetings and webinars. “Now more than ever, creating opportunities for the entire academic community to participate in discussions, presentations and lectures about today’s issues is vitally important,” said Ravi Pendse, vice president for information technology and chief information officer. “We want to improve the ability for… Read More »
The university recently entered into an agreement with Adobe that provides all faculty, staff and students on the Ann Arbor, Dearborn and Flint campuses and at Michigan Medicine with access to Adobe Creative Cloud apps. The agreement advances an ITS initiative that is based on a desire to build partnerships that would benefit the entire university community. Previously,… Read More »
79,093 in Ann Arbor. 39,163 in Michigan Medicine. 10,184 in Dearborn. 8,315 in Flint. That’s how many U-M students, staff, faculty, and sponsored affiliates – more than 133,700 in all – are now using Duo two-factor authentication to help protect the privacy of the institution’s digital information and assets as well as each individual’s personal information. The most… Read More »
U-M faculty, instructors, and academic administrators received an ITS Information Assurance email on October 31 informing them the first wave of emails had begun to students who were not using Duo and encouraging those students to turn it on early. Faculty and instructors were asked for their patience and understanding as students became familiar with the tool and… Read More »
Information and Technology Services is offering free training sessions to university community members for its Container Service – a high availability, secure environment for hosting containerized applications and services. Session attendees will be given workspace within the Container Service’s non-production cluster to do research-stage work, and will learn: how to use a Python application to run in the… Read More »
Beginning this fall, all students on the Ann Arbor, Dearborn, and Flint campuses are being encouraged to turn on Duo two-factor authentication by January 29. Faculty, staff, student employees, and sponsored affiliates across U-M voluntarily turned on two-factor authentication by this past January with the support of ITS and the overall Michigan IT community. Over 50% of the… Read More »
The new ITS Container Service – a foundational technology for modernizing ITS teaching and learning, web hosting, and other services – has officially arrived. This offering provides the university with a high availability, secure environment for hosting containerized applications and services. Containerization is a virtualization method offering several benefits over bare metal and virtual machines. As environments are… Read More »
A short while ago I had an opportunity to work abroad for a brief period. After securing approval from my supervisor and making the necessary arrangements, I discovered that working remotely not only allowed me to keep up on various projects, but to make headway while enjoying time out of the country. The experience of working while traveling… Read More »