January 18, 2019 Newsletter

Announcements

BlueStar will be doing an OIT electronics pickup on Thursday, January 31 at 9:30 a.m. Continue to place unused, broken and old equipment into the loading dock until that time. 

Kirk's retirement celebration will be held in UC 303 from 3:00 p.m. to 5:00 p.m. on Friday, January 18, 2019

Please join us in welcoming our new team members:

Cole - Temporary Desktop Support Lead, effective January 14, 2019
Garrett - Temporary Media Specialist, effective January 14, 2019
Leonardo (Leo) - Web Designer, effective January 14, 2019
 

We wish this team member the best in his future endeavors. 

 Kirk will be retiring on January 25, 2019. 

Congratulations to Eric and his wife, Courtney, as they welcomed their first child, August "Augie" David, on Monday, January 14, 2019!

UCCSconnect (Involvio) is continuing to evolve and develop new functionality for our students. This exciting app is meant to provide a one-stop location for our students to access information about their interests on campus as well as provide an intuitive way to find information about UCCS resources that can benefit them and make them successful with their time on campus! As part of this initiative, OIT and Student Life and Leadership have been partnering to replace the functionality currently provided by Mountain Lion Connect. The next stages of this project are to continue to add value to the app with course schedules being added, several other departments on campus adding their information and calendars to the app, and continued integration with services/technology students use on campus.

If you would like to learn more about UCCSconnect or would like to have your department considered for integration with the app please contact kwolf@uccs.edu for more information!

OIT has been chosen to present at the Educause Security Professionals Conference this May in Chicago. Several members of OIT will be presenting the strategy and technology used to implement Multi-Factor Authentication and other Microsoft security products that were successfully implemented over 2018 to mitigate compromised accounts and continually work towards providing a more secure environment for our students, staff, and faculty. 

Our outdoor wireless project is nearing completion with Wi-Fi access points being installed to the exterior of buildings over the following two weeks. The project team will begin testing of the system the week of January 21st. Following successful testing, the project team is targeting turning on the system for the use by campus mid-February. This project will provide Wi-Fi to the majority of the spine on campus and greater coverage for event areas like West Lawn.

OIT has been working on an initiative to improve our provisioning and management of accounts for UCCS. As part of this, we have a created a strategic partnership with CU- Denver. The project has three phases: requirements gathering, architecture, and development. We have recently completed the requirements gathering phase, which was the discovery and cataloging of the various use cases for how users and date are used currently at UCCS. This serves as the input into the architecture phase which will create the overall architecture and strategy for how data is used within UCCS and procured from UIS. We are currently in the final stages of the architecture phase. As a result of the architecture, one key difference from our current methodology will be changed. UCCS and CU-Denver will be migrating to Oracle Identity Manager in the cloud as opposed to on-premise instance we are currently on. This will allow for both campuses to be better supported and provide ease of administration. As we finalize architecture, UCCS will begin development in the new cloud instance with a target of provisioning accounts using this new system within the next 6 months. 

In less than one month, the long-anticipated and much-desired password renewal requirements will change for Faculty and Staff. The new requirements will allow Faculty and Staff to keep their UCCS password for twelve months, versus the current ninety days. With this new change, also comes a change in the length of passwords. Historically, faculty and staff have been required to only have nine characters, upper and lower case, for their password. Moving forward, passwords that are changed on or after February 11, 2019, will need at least twelve characters. 

The move to require more characters in a password is just one-way OIT Security is trying to protect our campus.  Users will be encouraged to think of these longer passwords as a "passphrase". Passphrases are easy to type, easy to remember and provides added security.  "Passphrase" requirements would no longer include capitalization, numbers or special characters. Starting February 11, 2019 users will be prompted to change their password, meeting the 12 digit requirement, when their password comes up for renewal. For questions regarding this change, please contact security@uccs.edu

OIT will be hosting their first UCCS Tech Day on October 9, 2019. This event will be open to Faculty, Staff, and Students. The intent is to increase campus engagement with OIT and bring awareness to the services that we offer. If you would like to present a workshop around one of the services you offer, contact Sarah.