March 15, 2019 Newsletter

Throughout the course of this year the Messaging, Collaboration and Productivity team will be reevaluating our Office 365 licensing and making some new tools available to the campus. The team looks forward to bringing you fully supported project and task clarity with Planner, quick information gathering with Forms, and robust document management with SharePoint Online. The team will also be revamping their communication practices to provide you with more timely information about the tools you care about.  

Improvements to Messaging:  

Outlook for iOS and Android is bringing in much more robust functionality to match some of the functionality you see in OWA and the desktop client. You will gain the ability to view coworkers’ free/busy schedules and set up Teams meetings right from your mobile device. Custom swipe options will become available, as well as avatars to make senders more recognizable. Interested in switching to Outlook for your mobile device? The app is available right in your App Store. 

Improvements to Collaboration: 

Microsoft Teams with only 2,500 members? Not anymore! Reach out to your very large groups with up to 5,000 people in one team. Remember, you are not restricted to just UCCS members. Feel free to use Teams to engage our community. If they have an email address, they can join your team!  

Coming Soon to Productivity:  

Harness the power of full Office365 integration to help plan projects, events, gatherings and more. Forms provides you with a quick and easy survey solution with data that can quickly turn into actionable items within Planner. Use Planner to assign tasks, update team members and visualize the workflow as you take an idea from start to finish.

With the support of senior OIT Leadership, the Help Desk and campus switchboard are undergoing a merger that will be effective May 20, 2019. This merger will allow our students to have additional opportunities to learn new technology, and for OIT to overall provide consistent customer service to our campus As the merger of these two functions comes to fruition, Interactive Voice Recognition (IVR) will also be put into place for all calls coming into the campus through the 719-255-UCCS number. The team recognizes the concern from stakeholders of introducing an automated system to campus but has seen the benefit of how the system operates after hours. The largest benefit of the IVR will allow our outside callers to skip waiting in a queue to speak to a person, and immediately be transferred to their desired location. Operators will still be assisting callers who bypass the IVR system.

OIT supported classrooms will be getting a phone upgrade over Spring Break. Over eighty different rooms will be upgraded to Cisco 7841 phones. These four button phones will feature two-speed dials to Academic Support and Public Safety, meet ADA standards once properly wall mounted and will be more energy efficient by using only 3.7 watts of power, versus the 12 watts the current phones are using.  The Academic Support team will be installing these new phones over Spring Break. The new phones are just one way that Unified Communications is providing consistency of telephony devices on campus.

Our Telecom team is excited to announce the testing of Cisco Unity Connection Web Inbox - the self-service portal for your voicemail needs! Access your voicemail, reset your PIN, turn your alternate (vacation) greeting on or off, all through the convenience of the web!

To access this service simply visit the Unity website through your on-campus connection or VPN and use your UCCS credentials, if prompted. Once logged in, users can listen to and delete voicemails from the main page. Clicking on the “Settings” option will launch a new tab where you can reset your PIN, adjust your message playback speed (which affects playback speed of messages listened to through the phone), and adjust some greeting settings. At this time, the ability to record greetings over the web is not currently available.  Visit our knowledge base for further instructions. 

Please note, that only the users themselves are able to log in and a delegate will not have access to their accounts. Please send feedback to helpdesk@uccs.edu.