Category Archives: Projects & Services

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Units moving forward on enhanced endpoint protection implementation

By | December 9, 2020
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padlock with skull image, wrapped in chaines

In October we reported that, along with other security tools like Virtru at U-M, CrowdStrike Falcon was being rolled out across the university on UM-owned machines. Falcon provides antivirus, anti-malware, and threat detection and mitigation capabilities, all of which offer stronger protection against ransomware and other malicious attacks than previous tools.  Deployment update  CrowdStrike Falcon has been deployed… Read More »

TeamDynamix saves the university time, money

By | December 9, 2020
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Customer support staff carrying communication icons

In May of this year, ITS released the TeamDynamix (TDX) service management system. TDX was selected for many reasons, including ease of use, accessibility, and flexibility. TDX also arrived with significant cost savings. The benefits of TDX  U-M’s TeamDynamix licensing agreement provides unlimited enterprise licensing and multi-tenant capabilities, allowing for multiple ticketing applications within the U-M Private Cloud… Read More »

Research reproducibility in data science and the role of IT staff

By | December 8, 2020
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two men looking at a computer screen

A significant challenge facing a wide variety of disciplines is the ability to reproduce research results. Researchers across U-M are working together to develop best practices that promote reproducible data science, and Michigan IT staff play an important role in this effort. “Many IT staff members don’t normally get involved directly in specific research projects, so the reproducibility… Read More »

HPC allocation for academic use

By | December 7, 2020
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glowing lights and cables from server rack

To support academic discovery, ARC-TS will offer Great Lakes High-Performance Computing Cluster for classroom use for the 2020-2021 academic year. Each course can have $100 per student for HPC, GPU, Jupyter, and RStudio resources. Great Lakes is the university’s flagship, open-science, high-performance computing cluster. Just one second of computing on the Great Lakes network is the same as… Read More »

Michigan Medicine SharePoint upgrade: Learning opportunities, development freeze, community of practice

By | November 30, 2020
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SharePoint Online logo

Michigan Medicine is upgrading its existing Microsoft SharePoint 2016 environment to SharePoint Online, a cloud-based service that will provide new opportunities for teams to share and manage content, knowledge, and applications. Pilots and testing are happening now, and HITS plans to introduce SharePoint Online across all of Michigan Medicine beginning in early 2021. In addition to significantly improving the… Read More »

Support for Sophos Antivirus on UM-owned machines to end December 2020

By | November 30, 2020
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A laptop with a magnifying glass and a shield hovering over it.

Support for Sophos Antivirus installed on U-M machines will end on December 31, 2020. Enhanced Endpoint Protection powered by CrowdStrike replaces Sophos. The Sophos product will continue to work, but will not be updated, and quickly will become deprecated. If you are responsible for managing university Macs, please ensure that you transition them to CrowdStrike Falcon for endpoint… Read More »

HITS announces the rollout of eduroam across Michigan Medicine; improvements to MWireless-UMHS

By | November 11, 2020
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Wifi_icon2

Health Information Technology & Services (HITS) is excited to announce changes and improvements to two of its WiFi networks across Michigan Medicine in November. Michigan Medicine began offering eduroam on November 9 across all of its buildings, including NCRC, the medical school, hospitals and clinics. The eduroam service is a dual band network that allows visitors from other… Read More »

COVID-19 research leverages machine learning and high-performance computing

By | November 9, 2020
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A researcher in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) is pioneering two separate, ongoing efforts for measuring and forecasting COVID-19: pandemic modeling and a risk tracking site. The projects are led by Sabrina Corsetti, a senior undergraduate student pursuing dual degrees in honors physics and mathematical sciences, and supervised by Thomas Schwarz, Ph.D., associate professor of physics. The modeling uses a machine learning algorithm that can forecast future COVID-19 cases and deaths. The weekly predictions are made using the ARC-TS Great Lakes High-Performance Computing Cluster, which provides the speed and dexterity to run the modeling algorithms and data analysis needed for data-informed decisions that affect public health. Each week, 51 processes (one for each state and one for the U.S.) are run in parallel (at the same time). “Running all 51 analyses on our own computers would take an extremely long time. The analysis places heavy demands on the hardware running the computations, which makes crashes somewhat likely on a typical laptop. We get all 51 done in the time it would take to do 1,” said Corsetti. “It is our goal to provide accurate data that helps our country.” The predictions for the U.S. at the national and state levels are fed into the COVID-19 Forecasting Hub, which is led by the UMass-Amherst Influenza Forecasting Center of Excellence based at the Reich Lab. The weekly predictions generated by the hub are then read out by the CDC for their weekly forecast updates Center for Disease Control (CDC) COVID-19 Forecasting Hub. The second project, a risk tracking site, involves COVID-19 data-acquisition from a Johns Hopkins University repository and the Michigan Safe Start Map. This is done on a daily basis, and the process runs quickly. It only takes about five minutes, but the impact is great. The data populates the COVID-19 risk tracking site for the State of Michigan that shows by county the total number of COVID-19 cases, the average number of new cases in the past week, and the risk level. “Maintaining the risk tracking site requires us to reliably update its data every day. We have been working on implementing these daily updates using Great Lakes so that we can ensure that they happen at the same time each day. These updates consist of data pulls from the Michigan Safe Start Map (for risk assessments) and the Johns Hopkins COVID-19 data repository (for case counts),” remarked Corsetti. “We are proud to support this type of impactful research during the global pandemic,” said Brock Palen, director of Advanced Research Computing - Technology Services. “Great Lakes provides quicker answers and optimized support for simulation, machine learning, and more. It is designed to meet the demands of the University of Michigan’s most intensive research.” ARC-TS is a division of Information and Technology Services (ITS). Related information U-M senior’s COVID-19 data model reaches CDC Student’s COVID-19 data model reaches CDC

A researcher in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts (LSA) is pioneering two separate, ongoing efforts for measuring and forecasting COVID-19: pandemic modeling and a risk tracking site.  The projects are led by Sabrina Corsetti, a senior undergraduate student pursuing dual degrees in honors physics and mathematical sciences, and supervised by Thomas Schwarz, associate professor of… Read More »

Campus units invited to receive Microsoft Premier Support

By | November 4, 2020
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Photo of a large, glass Microsoft building.

All technical support staff from campus units are invited to receive Microsoft support services at reduced rates by partnering with ITS in its Microsoft Premier Support contract. By joining the pay2play program, campus units using Microsoft (MS) systems and applications can receive MS Premier Support services, such as unlimited 24-hour access to MS specialists, at highly discounted rates.… Read More »

Patient data tells a story to help Michigan Medicine clinicians read ahead

By | November 4, 2020
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Hospital patients produce a tremendous amount of data. Throughout Michigan Medicine, MCIRCC’s PICTURE analytic is reading the stories within this data to help clinicians act on potential emergencies chapters in advance. In the summer of 2020, the Michigan Center for Integrative Research in Critical Care (MCIRCC) detailed its predictive analytic “PICTURE,” which crunches an array of patient data—including… Read More »

Clinical Enterprise Imaging (CEI) coming summer of 2021

By | November 3, 2020
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Man and woman in lab coats viewing MRI images on computer monitor

The current enterprise viewer used for diagnostic images (WebPACS) that launches from MiChart will be replaced next year. Health Information Technology & Services (HITS) plans to deploy the new viewer, Mach7, initially with McKesson in the summer of 2021 and then with the new Sectra PACS in the fall of 2021. “Michigan Medicine has outgrown the capabilities of… Read More »

Google Meet: Keeping virtual convenient

By | November 3, 2020
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White background with the new Google Meet logo and the words "Google Meet" in the middle.

As our work and education continue to move online, it is important to become acquainted with each videoconferencing service the university offers. Moreover, with the announcement of the retirement of BlueJeans in May 2021, consider an option for day-to-day meetings that’s already available at your fingertips: Google Meet. Google Meet is a G Suite for Education videoconferencing core… Read More »

Access to BlueJeans in Canvas ends Jan. 12

By | October 30, 2020
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BlueJeans logo

Last month, ITS announced that the university will retire BlueJeans effective May 1, 2021. To prepare for this change, ITS has begun work on the steps needed to replace BlueJeans with Zoom in ITS-supported applications, including Canvas. As part of this process, BlueJeans integrations in Canvas will no longer be available starting Tuesday, January 12, 2021. Users will… Read More »

MRequest (FootPrints) to retire in December 2021

By | October 28, 2020
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16 connected honeycomb shapes with icons inside that include a lightbulb, gears, a cloud, and the retirement date of Dec. 2021.

MRequest (FootPrints) is a web-based service that allows central tracking and management of customer support and other issues. It is slated to retire on December 17, 2021.  More than 20 U-M schools, colleges, and major administrative units use the service. While primarily used by campus IT departments, campus units have discovered other uses for MRequest (FootPrints) as well. For… Read More »

Microsoft Azure cloud computing credits awarded, credits still available

By | October 28, 2020
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The Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) and Information and Technology Services (ITS) recently partnered with Microsoft Azure to offer cloud computing credits to U-M faculty members for both research and teaching projects.   Congratulations to the following faculty members who received awards for their projects.  Emily Mower Provost, associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science, College of… Read More »

Collaborating for student success, one space at a time!

By | October 26, 2020
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While preparing for the fall term under the COVID-19 pandemic, the university recognized that the student experience on campus in the 2020–21 academic year would be very different than a regular term at U-M. To support students on campus, the university launched a new web-based space reservation system and app for the Ann Arbor campus called Study Spaces… Read More »

HITS deploys high reliability app delivery through MCloud

By | October 23, 2020
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drawings of computers and cloud overlayed on a computr screen with code

The Academic IT DevOps team from Health Information Technology & Services (HITS) recently deployed their first containerized vendor applications to Google Cloud Platform (GCP) through MCloud. By the end of December 2020, it will be supporting thousands of users and over 500 departmental solutions, including Jenkins, GitLab, Michigan Medicine HR Service Desk, and the Data Office Service Desk. These applications… Read More »

Improvements to the UM Emergency Alerts system

By | October 21, 2020
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UM Emergency Alerts logo

The Division of Public Safety and Security (DPSS) and Information and Technology Services (ITS) have partnered to improve the UM Emergency Alerts system for all University of Michigan campuses.  On October 19, the university introduced a new enrollment page, alerts.umich.edu, where students, faculty, and staff can go to verify or update their preferred mobile number to receive UM Emergency… Read More »

Library IT overhauls its portfolio management system

By | October 12, 2020
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M Library logo

Academic library service portfolios are mostly a mix of big to small strategic initiatives and tactical projects. Some are well-defined development projects with a fixed timeline, while others are ongoing support and legacy systems needing IT resources in order to update and sustain them. The needs and aspirations of the service and programmatic areas of the library are… Read More »